Few hymns have been so thoroughly annexed by power.
The Te Deum became the standard European liturgical response to victory, treaty, coronation and royal birth, and the phrase "a Te Deum was sung" appears in chronicles as shorthand for official thanksgiving. It was sung after Agincourt, after Lepanto, at the coronations of English monarchs, and at the Peace of Westphalia. The custom created a curious situation in which both sides of a European war might sing the same hymn for the same battle.
Musically it has been set by an enormous number of composers, Purcell, Handel, Haydn, Berlioz, Bruckner, Verdi and Dvorak among them, and the settings are typically among their loudest works, written for state occasions with trumpets and drums.
Charpentier's setting has an afterlife its composer could not have anticipated: its prelude has been the theme of the European Broadcasting Union since 1954, which means it introduces the Eurovision Song Contest and other continental broadcasts. Several hundred million people a year hear a seventeenth-century French liturgical prelude without knowing what it is.
The hymn's own words include a line that most of its state performances rather pass over: the petition asking that the singers be kept this day without sin, and the closing plea that they may never be confounded. It ends in supplication rather than triumph, which is not what the trumpets suggest.