Words with music aren't the same as words without music even though the words are the same words.
A composer, when they are setting words*, especially words with very significant meaning, has choices to make, just like someone who is speaking lines does. Someone speaking words and who cares to communicate their meaning will vary their inflection and timing to try to clarify the meaning of those words. They can, also, use inflection, timing and volume to try to assert their understanding or interpretation of those words.
Singers and, even more so, composers have all of those tools of elucidation and many more. They have an extended range of timing options, and, since singing is sustained speech, sustaining the vowels, the voiced consonants with the enormous range of possibilities of manipulating time and rhythm and volume and diction, those are multiplied, perhaps into an infinity of possible choices.
One of the first issues in setting words to music is whether or not a syllable is going to be sung on one pitch or a few pitches or in an extended, melismatic line of pitches, of equal or varying lengths. One way to make the words clear is by assigning one pitch to each syllable. That can be especially effective if the text can be presumed to be unknown to the audience who will be hearing the words without access to the score or the text. While the use of more than one note per syllable can be one of the more effective means of calling attention to that word or that part of a text, it runs the risk of obscuring the words as well. When, as in the Magnificat settings, in English by William Byrd you object to, the lines are set in a complex texture of other sung lines, that can be a real impediment to understanding the words.
However, he composed his Magnificat settings for singers and listeners for whom those words would be as familiar as the words of the dreary atheist anthem, "Imagine" would be for most of the people reading this. In that case his assumption would have been, not that he would have to feed the words to his audience but that they would know them already.
When that's the case a composer has other choices to make, including what parts of the text they want to emphasize. In the BBC movie I posted, they pointed out that in his three mass settings the Catholic, William Byrd, living in a country where Catholics hearing mass were hunted down, tortured and killed by the state, he chose to set the words (Credo en) Et unam, sanctam, cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam, (I believe) in one holy Catholic and apostolic church, he set them in a more chordal style that would make them stand out, even within the already and entirely familiar text of the ordinary of the mass.
Also, when a text would have been as familiar to the singers and hearers as those of The Magnificat, especially in the vernacular language, a composer has a choice to make their setting, not a declamation of the text, but a meditation on it. That can bring a text, recited or sung by many of them every single day, to life in a way that wouldn't be dulled by habit and the tendency of the mind to wander when the task of going through the words can be done by rote. Byrd's settings and many of those I've posted can, if seen that way, open up the meaning of the text for wider consideration as to what they mean. Repeating a passage in different voices is a way to call your attention to those words and to provide a means of considering their meaning. When seen that way it doesn't seem at all stupid or unnatural, as if singing even a simple folk song, often rhymed, timed verse, even without repetition of text is a "natural" thing to start with.
Different composers will have different understandings of those words and will use their settings to set out different aspects of those words for consideration. Listening with the words in front of you, or, even better, the score, can help you to experience the music in that way. Even better would be to sing the lines while listening or, best of all, live with other singers, can bring you to a deeper understanding than either just listening to the beauty of the music or just reading the words in silence. That's the way this music should be heard, and learned. It's the way that music theory should be taught, not just making dots and lines on music paper with numbers underneath.
Try it, you might like it. I know it's not as easy as listening to the mop head droning on soporifically, automatically mumbling along with the words, for the 462,017th time but the text of the Magnificat more than matches even the most sophisticated musical treatment. But maybe I shouldn't get into that again till after the New Year.
* I include jazz and other improvisational singers as full and honorable members in the fellowship of composers.
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