Their moving musical correspondence found its origin in the time when de Monte had travelled to England in the retinue of King Philip II of Spain and came into contact with the Byrd musical family. William Byrd was still a youngster of 15 at the time, but 30 years later he received de Monte’s manuscript of Super flumina Babylonis. The parallel between the banished Jews and the precarious situation of Byrd as a Catholic in Anglican England was an obvious show of solidarity.

A year later, Byrd answered with Quomodo cantabimus: a motet full of melancholy and complex skill. ‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’.