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Sibelius (51 KB)[ Berlioz music scores / Faust / Requiem / Cellini / Roméo / Ophélie / Te deum / Vox populi / Other sites ]
[ Te Deum / Tibi omnes / Prélude / Marche / Dignare / Christe / Te ergo / Judex ]
The Te deum is one of the last of Berlioz’s major “architectural” works, composed in 1848–49, in which massed instrumental and vocal forces are deployed by the composer like an army in order to exploit alternately colossal and intimate sonorities in a vast, spacious acoustic. This martial connotation is strengthened by the possibility that the work may have inherited some music from some of Berlioz’s earlier projected works with a military cast. In 1831 and 1832 Berlioz planned several vast works, including sketches for a Napoleonic symphony which would have been entitled Le Retour de l’armée d’Italie. It is reasonable to presume that some of the character of this “symphonie militaire” made its way into Berlioz’s subsequent works in this genre, the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, the rarely-performed cantata L’impériale, and the Te deum.
The Te deum certainly contains other self-borrowings, as Berlioz twice re-uses music from his Messe solennelle. This work had been written in white heat by the twenty-year old composer in 1824 and performed twice later in the 1820s, after which Berlioz claimed that he committed it and a few other immature works to the flames. However the autograph full score, presumed to be irretrievably lost, was rediscovered in an organ loft in 1991; Berlioz had given it as a present to a friend and must have instead recalled burning the many pages of orchestral parts and vocal scores. This sensational discovery of a major work unheard for 165 years revealed a number of relationships between Berlioz’s later masterpieces, and the Te deum is no exception; it was found that the Te ergo quæsumus had earlier been cast in abbreviated form as the Agnus dei of the 1824 Mass.
Unlike the Grande messe des morts and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, the composition of the Te deum did not result from a commission, so that Berlioz had to involve himself in the politics of lobbying in order to find a suitable occasion where it could gain a performance; after the half-hearted attendances at the premiére of La damnation de Faust, he had vowed never again to spend so much as a franc of his own money to obtain performances of his works. Fortunately the Te deum eventually did get its first performance on April 30, 1855, conducted by Berlioz; the occasion was the opening of the new organ in the church of St-Eustache. This was the only complete performance in Berlioz’s lifetime.
As he originally wrote the Te deum, Berlioz envisaged the orchestra would take the central position (“east”) in a large church, with the great pipe organ placed antiphonally at the far end (“west”) of the church. The musical dialogue between the orchestra (“the Emperor”) and the organ (“the Pope”) would thus resound from one end of the church to another. Similarly, the two mixed-voice choirs would be antiphonally placed in the north and south transepts of the church, so at a glance the ground plan would represent an enlargement of the spatial separation of the four brass orchestras in the Requiem, which also are distributed to the four compass points.
In the years that had elapsed since its composition, Berlioz’s intentions seems to have changed slightly. In 1851 he was a judge in the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London, and was deeply impressed by the singing of the Charity Children in St Paul’s Cathedral, particularly the powerful effect of 6,000 infant voices singing in unison; thus he revised the work the following year to add a third choir of children’s voices, which makes a contribution to the opening and closing choruses. Berlioz notes that the third chorus may be omitted if necessary, although it greatly enhances the general effect; its contribution has much the same effect as the third chorus' singing of the cantus firmus chorale in the opening chorus of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
In 1855 Berlioz managed to obtain a choir of 600 orphan children, together with the double choir of 150 singers and a hundred and fifty-strong orchestra. He had hoped to engage Liszt or Saint-Saëns to play the organ part, but eventually had to be satisfied with the services of the organist of St-Eustache, Édouard Batiste, when the English organist Henry Smart cancelled with only two days’ notice. The lack of a military occasion had led Berlioz to substitute the martial Prélude with a Marche pour la présentation des drapeaux, in conjunction with the grand opening of the Festival de l’Industrie. At the last minute however the Festival was postponed, so the Marche was played without any extra ceremony of the blessing of the flags of the Festival artisans. The final structure arrived at appears to be a seven-movement liturgical work with the abandonment of the military Prélude.
As he had done in the Grande messe des morts, Berlioz at times arbitrarily re-orders the traditional text of the Te Deum in order to increase its dramatic possibilities; the six choral movements that result from this re-arrangement are described as either “hymns” or “prayers”, and the climactic Judex crederis contains elements of each. Berlioz’s orchestration here is more restrained than its sibling work, but is also more refined. The brass section consists of a mere four horns, six trombones, two each of trumpets and cornets, ophicléide and tuba rather than the fifty corresponding instruments in the Requiem. As described earlier, there are also two additional instrumental pieces of martial character (the Prélude and Marche), which are currently available in Scorch format from the Hector Berlioz Website; together with the Judex crederis these movements utilise a variety of military percussion and these additions have caused some to view their inclusion in the work with suspicion.
1. Te Deum laudamus: HymneScorch Sibelius (51 KB)
The work begins with a series of five massive chords exchanged between full orchestra and full organ. The organ then proposes a theme consisting of a descending scale, which is initially rebuffed by the ensuing choral fugue, but gradually gains greater and greater prominence. The fugue is initially treated in severely strict counterpoint but reaches a climax with overlapping phrases derived from the scale. Several times the entrance of the scale on full organ serves to introduce an episode or effect an unexpected modulation; towards the end of the movement it suddenly appears after another climax and leads the music into the remote key of F# major, and the choir, as if awe-struck, can only respond by chanting the words “omnis terra” softly, their chords solemnly punctuated by trombones. The effect is heightened by a mysterious two-note pedal which gently rocks back and forth in the violas, cellos and basses, and the accumulation of sound with the entry of the children’s choir reveals that the modulation is to prepare for the Tibi omnes, which follows almost immediately in B major.
2. Tibi omnes: HymneScorch Sibelius (51 KB)
The understated beginning to the Tibi omnes, with what sounds like an innocent organ prelude played softly, belies the fact that the movement is one of Berlioz’s grandest masterpieces of orchestration. A soft melody sung by the sopranos is repeated with three different harmonisations, whilst the organ interjects after each phrase, and leads into a radiant setting of the words of the Sanctus, accompanied by softly arpeggiating woodwind. The strings gradually enter expressively and give weight to a crescendo which brings in the full chorus. The words “Pleni sunt cœli” are then treated to a huge orchestral climax to which the organ responds, and re-introduces the melody heard before, but now sung by tenors and reharmonised yet again. Where Berlioz could have simply repeated himself, he produces an even more virtuosic display of instrumental colour: the organ soars sweetly to zenith and back against delicate pizzicato runs in the violins, and the woodwind chatter away in thirds; a delicious sound which suddenly gives way to the soft crash of drums and cymbals, and surging brass notes covered by high tremelo strings.
A second orchestral climax and another organ interjection introduces the third verse, now sung by the basses and much more urgently accompanied by dotted figures in the strings. The third crescendo, involving the full choir for its entire length, leads to a double climax of fearsome power and solemnity. The organ returns again, but now to introduce the initial music of the movement, delicately transferred to strings. The movement ends in a prayerful mood of contemplation, the organ having the last word.
I would like to acknowledge the use of Phillip Rutherford’s arrangement which has proved invaluable in preparing this score.
PréludeScorch (26 KB)
With courtesy of the Hector Berlioz Website.
After the opening two movements we reach one of the vexed performance issues in Berlioz’s music; what to do with the ensuing Prélude. Structurally, the Prélude modulates from the B major ending of the Tibi omnes to prepare for the D major of the Dignare. However Berlioz’s footnote to the score states that if the Te deum is not being performed for a thanksgiving after a victory, nor for any military service, then the Prélude must be omitted. This instruction is followed as a matter of course in modern performance tradition, since nowadays few (if any) military occasions are celebrated by Berlioz’s Te deum! In Berlioz’s day several performances planned to commemorate French victories fell through; even the 1855 performance was originally planned as a military celebration. The Prélude has thus all but disappeared into the void; only two recordings are known to include it.
Marche pour la présentation des drapeauxScorch (55 KB)
With courtesy of the Hector Berlioz Website.
The Marche, designed to accompany the presentation of colours (i.e. flags or emblems), is also frequently omitted in performances on the grounds that the instrumentation, including no less than 12 harps, is different from the six choral movements. What seems to be overlooked is that unlike the Prélude, Berlioz did view the Marche as integral to the work; in the 1855 performance he included it directly after the Tibi omnes, rather than at the end of the work where it is placed in the published score. This placement in the full score – as it was the last movement to be composed – is most unfortunate since posterity has judged the Marche as too weak in substance to end the work following the emphatic close of the Judex crederis.
In fact there is only one essential difference in instrumentation aside from the harps (which have nothing to do in the rest of the work), which is the inclusion of the then-newly invented piccolo saxhorn in high B flat. In practice the part for saxhorn could be played on a modern piccolo trumpet, if it were impossible to obtain an original instrument. The saxhorn is heard prominently as a solo instrument at bar 52, where the opening choral entry of the Te Deum laudamus is quoted; shortly after the descending scale is heard with the entry of the pipe organ. The return of the opening march theme is crowned by the glorious sound of massed harps, and the movement finishes with another reference to the ever-present descending scale.
Modern performance tradition seems to have hardened against playing the Marche, and all but two or three recordings omit it, however I am happy to report, with thanks to Michel Austin, that the Marche was played at a performance in Paris last year. For logistical reasons it was performed at the very beginning of the work – principally to remove the dozen harps from the front of the orchestra before continuing! The numeration of the remaining movements given here follows the current tradition but assumes the inclusion of the Marche before the Dignare.
3. Dignare: PrièreScorch Sibelius (33 KB)
The Dignare is a meditative movement in the form of an arch, and has the unusual technical device of being composed over a series of pedal points which last for many bars at a time. The voices and instruments continually weave new patterns on top of these long-held notes in a way which has the effect of an intensely personal plea after the grandiose and colossal visions of the Te Deum laudamus and Tibi omnes. The pedal notes rise by thirds from a low, soft D major, and as the movement develops a brief climax is reached in E major with the full orchestra and chorus. The pedal notes then descend back to their original pitch and the music also dies away to the subdued dynamic with which the movement began, as explained by the text: Berlioz was delighted to find that the words of the Te Deum contained a “miserere”.
4. Christe, rex gloriæ: HymneScorch Sibelius (59 KB)
The Christe is an extroverted movement with fervent choral writing; with the exception of the brief contrasting middle section, which has a correspondingly gentle depiction appropriate to its text, the tone is high-spirited and full of exhilarating orchestration. The section introducing the words “Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes in gloria Patris” is taken more or less verbatim from the only movement of the 1824 Mass which Berlioz saw fit to preserve, the Resurrexit, but whereas the earlier version of this passage is dynamic but rather characterless, the revised version is marked with some typically Berliozian harmonic fingerprints.
5. Te ergo quæsumus: PrièreScorch Sibelius (33 KB)
Before the rediscovery of Berlioz’s 1824 Mass, the opening theme of the Te ergo was highlighted by Hugh Macdonald as a good example of Berlioz’s effortless ability in creating individual, long-breathed melodies capable of considerable expansion and development. What he couldn’t have known at the time was that the composition of much of this movement pre-existed in the Agnus dei of the Mass, so that where Macdonald guessed the melody had once been an instrumental theme, as the Latin words of the Te Deum had to be constrained to fit the melody, in fact the melody was inspired by a completely different set of words!
Where the 1824 Agnus dei finishes, in the 1848–9 Te deum Berlioz adds a new section in the major key for the words “speravimus in te” sung by the solo tenor in floridly expressive melismas. The original melody returns in the choral basses, now in G major, to end the movement in subdued fashion, the choir singing a cappella and echoed by soft pizzicatos.
6. Judex crederis: Hymne et PrièreScorch Sibelius (96 KB) 
MIDI (216 KB)
The final movement, the Judex crederis, is Berlioz’s most apocalyptic vision since the composition of the Requiem – like the Lacrymosa it shares a boldly unorthodox fugue in 9/8 metre which strides through the movement like a juggernaut; here the choral entries freely modulate up a semitone each time in a display of technical prowess that Berlioz would have learned from Anton Reicha, a contemporary of Beethoven who shared with Berlioz a liking for unorthodox and expressive fugues. Like the Christe, the movement has a contrasting middle section of gentler character which abandons the prevaling metre and proceeds in 3/4 time. A sweeping figure in the orchestra accompanies an inspired melody for men’s voices and trombones, to the words “Per singulos dies”.
After this splendid melody, the middle section begins to lose energy when suddenly the 9/8 rhythm of the Judex crederis fugue returns in the bass instruments, superimposed against the 3/4 metre. The rhythm of the fugue takes over and a huge weight of instrumental sound amasses, including sinister pedal notes on the trombones underpinning disruptive harmonies. A climax on the word “speravi” fails to avert the return of the opening fugue, again with successive entries each rising by a semitone. Berlioz contrives to gradually rise to the initial pitch of the movement by starting the fugue at a lower pitch, which then leads to a climactic series of battles between the fugue subject and the return of the contrasting melodies heard earlier. The massed choruses finally win out with their cry of “non confundar in aeternum”, and the work ends with the most emphatic of cadences, spiced with brilliant cornet and trumpet fanfares.
Editor’s note: In creating the Sibelius file of the Judex crederis, or indeed any of the other movements, it is unfortunately impossible to reproduce the quadraphonic effect of Berlioz’s intentions in stereo, and one has to be satisfied with the inferior playback afforded by the MIDI format; the two mixed choirs are separated in left and right channels, and the orchestra, organ, children’s choir are sonically in the middle by being balanced in both channels.
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