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BBC Proms - 17 July - 12 September 2009 - The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival
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What's On / Programme Notes
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
Te Deum, Op. 22 (1855)
1 Te Deum laudamus
2 Tibi omnes
3 Dignare
4 Christe, rex gloriae
5 Te ergo quaesumus
6 Judex crederis
2 Tibi omnes
3 Dignare
4 Christe, rex gloriae
5 Te ergo quaesumus
6 Judex crederis
Berlioz passes for an agnostic, if not an
atheist. That is how he usually spoke of himself. As a child,
he had been a devout member of the Catholic Church; but, as he
remarked in the opening chapter of his Memoirs, ‘we have long
since fallen out’. Yet paradoxically a large proportion
of his music is concerned, one way or another, with religion
– and this in a period when religious music was in
decline in France.
Berlioz’s first composition to be
performed in public was a Mass. Three of his major works are
religious works – the Requiem (Grand messe des
morts), Te
Deum and L’enfance
du Christ. What is more, none of
them owes its origins to external causes: the impulse came from
the composer himself. Even in his secular works one is struck
by the recurrence of religious imagery. This is more than
simply a reflection of the contemporary Romantic vogue for
religion as a picturesque detail of landscape: it is a
preoccupation.
‘For seven whole years,’
Berlioz wrote of his childhood, religion was ‘the joy of
my life’. The very loss of this joy left a deep imprint.
Certainly he was not a believer but his music conveys an
intense regret that he cannot be one and a profound awareness
of the need to believe. His own lack of faith is, as it were,
used to evoke the eternal hopes and fears of the human race;
his intuitive understanding of the religious instinct, his
unsatisfied yearning for faith, enable him to respond to those
immemorial feelings and express them in his art. The result,
with all its unorthodox elements, is true religious music.
If the Te Deum and the Requiem seem to us unconventional works, this is partly
because the tradition to which they belong has been forgotten.
We would not think of their huge forces and grandiose, yet
austere, style as peculiarly Berliozian if we knew the many
similar works written a generation earlier in France by
composers like Méhul, Gossec and Le Sueur. Musical rites
on a gigantic scale were an important part of public life in
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras in France; they
represented a grand idea, the idea of the Nation, the People
assembled for a solemn communal act of worship. As a student,
Berlioz was taught by Le Sueur, and a close affinity grew up
between the old man and his young disciple. From Le Sueur
Berlioz learnt certain fundamental principles and practices:
for example, the necessity for a special style of music for
large, resonant buildings and ceremonial occasions, a style
marked by broad tempos and simple, deliberate harmonic
movement, and using space as an element of composition. The
four choirs of brass in Berlioz’s Requiem and the organ
answering chorus and orchestra from (in Berlioz’s own
scheme) the opposite end of the nave in his Te Deum have an
architectural function, being designed to clarify and emphasise
the musical structure and open up multiple perspectives.
Above all, Berlioz acquired from Le Sueur a
belief in the essentially dramatic character of religious
music, of which the ‘expression of feeling’ is just
as much the objective as it is of opera. Berlioz is first and
always a dramatist, whatever the character of the work in
question and whether its scale is monumental or intimate. The
concept that lies behind both the Te
Deum and the Requiem, of music as the
‘soul’ of a great sacred building, filling and
animating the body (which came to him as he stood for the first
time in the huge nave of St Peter’s in Rome), is a
dramatist’s concept. Both works are conceived in
consistently dramatic terms. There is a systematic use of
contrast – contrast of scale, volume and density,
contrast of texture – to emphasise a constant theme of
the words, the majesty of God and the littleness of Man.
In pursuit of this idea the composer does
not hesitate to change the order of the liturgical text, rather
as an opera composer feels free to modify the most venerated
stage play if the requirements of the music-drama demand it.
The first two movements of Berlioz’s Te Deum observe the sequence
of verses, but thereafter it is considerably altered. In order
that the splendours of the ‘Tibi omnes’ and
‘Christe, rex gloriae’ shall be separated by a
contrasting movement, subdued in character – the
‘Dignare’ – three verses are brought forward
from later sections. The same principle is responsible for the
‘Te ergo quaesumus’ interposing its gentle prayer
between the brilliant ‘Christe, rex gloriae’ and
the monumental ‘Judex crederis’. ‘Judex
crederis esse venturus’ (‘We believe that thou
shalt come to be our judge’) is actually only the 19th of
the Te Deum’s 28 verses, but here it is delayed until the
end, so that the work can culminate in a movement that conveys
in apocalyptic terms humanity’s fear of divine judgment.
As in the Requiem, side by side with the feeling of personal awe
and dread, here and now, there is an immense sense of
antiquity, of unnumbered voices raised in prayer from age to
age throughout time: for example, in the repeated cry of the
woodwind at ‘Have mercy upon us’ in the
‘Dignare’ or the evocation of endless generations
in the middle section of the ‘Judex crederis’. The
passages where the full forces are deployed suggest a God of
truly ‘infinite majesty’, the music pealing out
like a great bell, at once uplifting and terrifying.
While in Dresden in 1843 Berlioz was shown
some scores by the 18th-century composer Hasse, and was struck
by a Te Deum that he described as having ‘the ceremonial
brilliance of a great peal of bells’. Reading
Hasse’s score may well have been one of the stimuli that
led him to conceive his own setting of the text a few years
later. Another, perhaps, was the experience of conducting his
own Requiem at St Eustache in Paris in 1846 – the first
complete performance since the premiere in 1837. There is much
in common between the two works. ‘The Requiem has a
brother,’ he wrote to Liszt after the first performance
of the Te Deum, also in St Eustache, and he described the
‘Judex crederis’ as ‘first cousin’ of
the ‘Lacrymosa’ in the Requiem. The Te Deum seems also to be related to a project that he
had worked on in the 1830s, in honour of the great men of
France’s past, among whom Napoleon was to have had pride
of place. This ‘Fête musicale funèbre’
was abandoned, but it is possible that the Te Deum owed some of its
impulse, if not also some of its musical ideas, to it. There is
a martial spirit in the work that is not present in the Requiem. Its most
obvious expression is in the two instrumental movements, the
‘Prelude’ and the ‘March for the Presentation
of the Colours’ (music designed to accompany the
pageantry of military ceremonial, and thus having no place in a
performance, like tonight’s, that doesn’t include
it); but there are echoes of it elsewhere, for example in the
timpani part in the opening movement and the sidedrums in the
‘Judex crederis’. Yet the work transcends these
local origins, expressing feelings common to all people. The
Napoleonic tradition is universalised; the Revolutionary
community becomes the community of humankind in all ages.
In 1851, while in London as a member of the
jury on musical instruments at the Great Exhibition, Berlioz
attended the annual Charity Children’s service at St
Paul’s and was deeply impressed by the sound of the hymn
‘All people that on earth do dwell’ sung by
thousands of young voices. By then the Te Deum had been in
existence for over a year and he had been trying to get it
performed. Under the stimulus of the St Paul’s service he
added a third, unison chorus to the two three-part choruses
that carry the main argument. The function of the third choir
is to suggest the congregation – ‘the People, from
time to time taking part in the great religious concert’.
As for the organ, its role is rarely to augment the sonority of
the orchestra, but rather to contrast with it and complement
it, and also to underline moments of particular format or
expressive significance. Organ and orchestra are independent
powers: in the composer’s words, they converse
‘like Pope and Emperor’.
1 Te Deum
Massive chords, antiphonal on orchestra and
organ and laid out with a long reverberation period in mind,
set the scale and spatial character of the work. At their
conclusion the organ proclaims a descending theme that will
reappear at intervals during the movement, always to ‘Te,
aeternum Patrem’ and associated with the third choir. The
three-note falling phrase in the organ theme’s fifth bar
recurs during the work as a kind of motto, sometimes ringing
out with bell-like splendour, sometimes as a soft, insistent
prayer for mercy. It also forms part of the fugue subject that
the sopranos announce immediately after the organ’s
statement, and that quickly builds up to a jubilant climax.
‘Omnis terra’ is sung quietly, in contrasting
homophonic style, as though the whole earth were prostrating
itself before the grandeur of God. Towards the end this more
mysterious mood takes possession, and the movement comes to
rest on a high pianissimo chord, in preparation for the ‘Tibi
omnes’.
2 Tibi omnes
An organ prelude introduces the movement
(at the end it returns as orchestral epilogue). The sopranos of
Choir 1 announce a short melody, modal in character. After
several repetitions, each differently harmonised, it leads to a
long crescendo on ‘Sanctus’, with an accompaniment
suggestive of gathering multitudes, rising to a great shout on
‘Pleni sunt coeli’, the cadence being marked by the
reappearance of the organ. The process is repeated twice, each
time with varied harmony and texture, the last time with an
expanded conclusion of great pomp, before the quiet close.
3 Dignare
A subdued movement, after the powerful
sonorities of the previous choruses. Over a series of pedal
notes ascending and then descending by regular steps of a major
and a minor third and supported by the basses in muttered
unison, sopranos and tenors in free imitation repeat with a
kind of gentle urgency the prayer for divine salvation from
sin. Towards the middle of the movement the motto phrase
appears again and again in the woodwind, like a timeless cry
for mercy.
4 Christe, rex gloriae
A simple, brilliantly sonorous and
rhythmically energetic movement, based on a descending theme
for voices and a rising theme for orchestra. A short central
section in slower time, dominated by the tenors, strikes a more
contemplative note.
5 Te ergo quaesumus
As in the ‘Agnus Dei’ of the
Mass of 1825, on which this movement is based, a solo tenor,
above broken string phrases, unfolds a quiet but fervent prayer
for Christ’s compassion. The women’s voices add a
soft, faraway pleading, with the unusual but expressive
accompaniment of cornets and trombones. Towards the end, at
‘speravimus’, G minor lightens to G major. The
prayer closes with all voices unaccompanied and sotto voce, founded on
the solo tenor’s melody, sung by the basses.
6 Judex crederis
The crowning chorus is based on a long
modal theme, the rhythm of whose opening bars forms one of the
gigantic ostinatos by which the music is controlled and
propelled. There is no key signature: the theme is so
constituted that each repetition of it begins a semitone higher
than the one before, and for a long time the attempt to
establish B flat as the principal key is in doubt. The metre,
like that of the ‘Lacrymosa’, is a surging 9/8,
majestic and menacing. A central section in 3/4 time asserts a
calmer mood, and the prayer for salvation rises to a climax,
with the motto theme ringing out confidently. Then, distant at
first but growing in urgency (to which the baleful sound of
trombone pedal notes contributes), the pounding rhythm returns
and the theme of the ‘Judex crederis’ is developed
at length, with constantly varied and increasingly grand
sonorities; the writing for brass is as resplendent as anything
by Berlioz. The note B flat, reiterated with implacable
insistence, is finally revealed as the key-note. The choral
part of the movement ends with repeated cries of ‘non
confundar in aeternum’ (‘let me not be confounded
for all eternity’), the music swaying between terror and
splendour like the swing of an enormous bell. There is a short
but conclusive coda for orchestra and organ, this time united,
as the prayer for salvation is lifted to the heights by the
angelic trumpets.
Programme note © David Cairns
David Cairns, writer, lecturer and
conductor, is a former music critic of the ‘Sunday
Times’. His most recent book is ‘Mozart and His
Operas’.
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| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July | ||||||
| 17 | 18 | |||||
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
| August | ||||||
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
| September | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
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