Berlioz : Te deum

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.

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