Te Deum

Words and music are inextricably linked in Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum. The Estonian composer displays extraordinary reverence for the work’s sacred Latin text, widely considered to date from the fifth century CE. He divides the great hymn into three unbroken sections, the first of which subverts convention not by shouting God’s praises but by speaking with a quiet voice. “I had to draw this music gently out of silence and emptiness,” recalled Pärt in the early 1990s. Te Deum rises from a barely audible drone for aeolian harp, like the distant voices of forgotten ancestors carried on the wind. The piece, completed in 1985 and revised the following year, is scored for three choirs, string orchestra, aeolian or wind harp and prepared piano. It alternates between passages of monophonic chant for either male or female voices, writing for strings alone and music for mixed four-part choir. Pärt punctuates his composition’s contemplative mood with periodic expressions of joy, unrestrained in the central “Tu Rex gloriae, Christe” (“You are the King of Glory, O Christ”), before enfolding the hymn’s final prayers for mercy and intercession in profound stillness.