There appears to be much disagreement amongst scholars, fuelled by inconsistencies in ancient sources, about the original plainsong melody of the Te Deum.  The simple and solemn tones (used respectively for ordinary and feast days) contain discrepancies between the two main sources – the Liber Usualis (a book of commonly used Gregorian chants compiled by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes Abbey in France ) and the Antiphonale Monasticum (a Benedictine missal which gives the offices of the day and the propers of the seasons).  Further variants exist in the form of a twelfth-century north Italian Carthusian manuscript, a thirteenth-century Roman manuscript and the Sarum Rite – a rite which was commonly used in England up until the mid fifteenth century, and which originated in Salisbury. The earliest polyphonic setting is in the Musica Enchiriadis (an anonymous musical treatise from the 9th century), although the polyphony exists as parallel moving fourths and thirds (essentially a sequence of 64 chords) known as organum. A number of references from the tenth to the fourteenth century suggest that the Te Deum was accompanied by organ and bells on high days – such harmony as existed probably being improvised.  Fully notated examples in England exist from the early sixteenth century by composers such as Taverner and Shepherd, and there is a Te Deum mass from the later sixteenth century by Palestrina which uses the Te Deum melody as a cantus firmus.  Baroque settings exist by Lully, Michael Praetorius, J. S. Bach (using a Lutheran translation) and Buxtehude. From the classical period six settings survive by Michael Haydn and two by his brother Josef.  Nineteenth-century settings exist by Berlioz, Bruckner, Dvořák and Verdi which are established as mainstream Romantic repertoire.

This setting in C by Britten was written in 1934 for the choir of St Mark’s, North Audley Street, in London.  It is characterised by an opening section which builds up C major fanfare type figures through the voices over a syncopated bass line in the organ part, followed by a more homophonic second section which uses the syncopated figure in each of the four voices from bass up to soprano. Britten sets the section of text, which is in praise of Christ, to a very restrained, almost melancholic passage, with a haunting soprano solo punctuated by quiet choral exclamations.  The opening fanfare material returns with words from Psalm 28 before being replaced in turn by the syncopated motif which, although initially lively, leads the work eventually to a quiet and reflective close using again the material given originally to the solo soprano.


An Oxford Elegy: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Some composers write masterpieces at the age of seventeen. Others, at the same age, write nothing. Mozart and Schubert both crammed a lifetime’s worth of work into three short decades, whilst others grow to maturity much more slowly. Ralph Vaughan Williams was one such composer. Had he died at the same age that Schubert did, he would be unknown to us today as a composer. Born in 1872, in the vicarage of the Gloucestershire village of Down Ampney, Vaughan Williams’ style was to develop steadily over the final five decades of the eight which made up his life. His first significant work, The Sea Symphony, was not written until 1903, by which time he was over thirty, and most of the works for which he is remembered today were written in his fifties and sixties.

The first English composer of any note to write an opera since Purcell in the late seventeenth century, Vaughan Williams is perhaps the most quintessentially English of all twentieth-century English composers. Whilst we think of Elgar, a contemporary of Vaughan Williams, as a great English composer, his musical style was derived from a personal study of the great nineteenth-century German symphonists. For Vaughan Williams, school at Charterhouse was followed by a period of musical study at the Royal College of Music with Stanford and Parry and at Trinity College Cambridge with Charles Wood. He emerged from this in 1900 with a doctorate in music, an F.R.C.O. and various other qualifications, but still no compositions of any significance to his name. Resistant to the romantic musical style of his teachers and of Elgar, he found himself without a voice. At a chance meeting with an elderly retired shepherd at, of all places, a vicar’s tea party (his father was a country rector), Vaughan Williams was introduced to folksong. It was a meeting which was to change his life. During a ten year period from 1902, he travelled around the countryside and coastline of Great Britain, usually on foot, collecting folksongs from farmers, shepherds, gardeners, fishermen, stonemasons, dairymaids and the like in a notebook. By 1910 he had over 800 of them. He soaked himself in their melodic shapes, their often modal harmonic implications, and their quirky rhythms.