From the late Middle Ages the Dies Irae was sung as the sequence of the Requiem Mass, the long poem standing between the readings in every sung Mass for the dead, and it held that place until the reform of the Roman missal in 1970 removed it from the funeral liturgy, whose revisers preferred the note of paschal hope. The revised Liturgy of the Hours retains it as an optional hymn in the last week of the church's year, so the text survives in official use, but its enormous cultural presence now rests on music.
Every great Requiem setting is in part a Dies Irae, from the terror of Mozart's to the whispered fugues of Verdi's, whose opening bass drum strokes are among the most feared bars in the choral repertoire, to Berlioz's, which throws four brass bands at the trumpet stanza. The plainchant melody itself, the falling phrase attached to the opening words, became a musical symbol of death quoted far outside the liturgy, in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Liszt's Totentanz, Saint-Saens's Danse macabre, Rachmaninoff's obsessive returns to it across his output, and scores of film soundtracks, so that listeners who have never heard a Requiem recognize the phrase without knowing they are hearing a thirteenth century sequence about the day of judgement.