Te Deum

The Te Deum is the great Latin hymn of thanksgiving, sung at coronations, at the conclusion of councils, at victories and at the end of Matins, and its traditional authorship is a legend with a known shape.

The story, current from the eighth century, is that Ambrose baptised Augustine at Milan in 387 and that the two men composed the hymn on the spot, alternating verses under inspiration. It is a good story and it is not attested by either man, neither of whom mentions the hymn, and Augustine wrote at length about his own baptism.

The attribution now generally preferred is to Niceta of Remesiana, a bishop in what is now Serbia, active around 400. The case rests on manuscript ascriptions, several early manuscripts name him, and on stylistic and structural arguments. It is not certain, and other candidates have been proposed, including Hilary of Poitiers and an anonymous compiler.

The hymn's structure is worth noticing because it explains why it feels like two texts. The first portion is a doxology, praising God and the Trinity in language that echoes the Sanctus. The second turns to Christ specifically. The third is a series of verses drawn almost entirely from the Psalms, in a different register, and many scholars regard it as a later addition, a set of versicles that became attached and then fixed.

So the hymn as sung may be a composite of two or three pieces of different origin, which is a common enough history for a liturgical text and is invisible in performance.

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.