Sounding the Trumpets for Charpentier's Te Deum Prelude
The Backstory

Working for the Jesuits and a Royal Nephew

Back in the late 1680s and through the 1690s, I had a very busy job in Paris as the music director at the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis. When I was not preparing services for the church, I was giving composition lessons to Philippe d'Orleans, who happened to be the Duke of Chartres and the nephew of King Louis XIV. Teaching a royal nephew means you always have to look sharp and keep your best musical ideas ready at a moment's notice. It was right in the middle of those bustling years in Paris that I sat down to write my grand motet, the Te Deum in D major.

Bringing Out the Big Brass

Whenever France won a major victory during the Nine Years' War, the church needed a grand service of thanksgiving to celebrate the news. I actually have four surviving settings of this Latin hymn, which the American musicologist Hugh Wiley Hitchcock later numbered H. 145 through H. 148 in his 1982 catalogue. For the one now known as H. 146, a quiet prayer simply would not do, so I made it the only setting of the four to include trumpets and timpani. Adding drums and brass to a church piece is a bit like bringing fireworks to a garden party, because everyone in the pews immediately sits up straight.

A Mystery on the Calendar

I kept the handwritten score neatly tucked into Volume 10, Cahier 62 of my personal notebooks, which have been dated to around 1691 or 1692. Because the surviving records from that time have a few holes in them, nobody knows the exact date or occasion of the very first performance. Most scholars link the premiere at the church of Saint-Louis to the celebrations after the French victory at the Battle of Steenkerque in August 1692, though others point to the Treaty of Turin in 1696. Even the conductor's name was left out of the paperwork, though as the church's music director, it was my job to stand up front and lead my own works.

Eight Singers Waiting in the Wings

If you only know the famous opening march, you might think the whole composition is just a short showcase for the orchestra. In truth, my Te Deum Prelude is only the purely instrumental curtain-raiser for a much larger sacred work that lasts about twenty-five minutes. While the flutes, oboes, trumpet, timpani, strings, and basso continuo play this opening movement, eight vocal soloists and a full mixed choir are standing there waiting for their cue. They stay completely silent during the Prelude, saving their voices for the ten vocal and choral sections of the Latin hymn that follow right after.

Why I Picked D Major

When I wrote my treatise on the rules of composition, I explained that every musical key has its own distinct personality and mood. For a celebration of a military or diplomatic triumph, I naturally reached for D major, a key I described in my book as both joyful and very warlike. I cast the Prelude as a Marche en rondeau in a steady two-beat meter, so the music struts forward with the confidence of a general leading a parade. The main refrain comes back again and again between gentler instrumental passages, making sure that festive feeling stays firmly in the listener's ear.

Giving My Rival Too Much Credit

Over the years, some people have mistakenly claimed that my famous Prelude was actually written by my contemporary and rival, Jean-Baptiste Lully. It is true that Lully composed his own Te Deum back in 1677, long before I put pen to paper for mine in the 1690s. Having your best tune credited to your biggest competitor is like cooking a five-course feast only for the guests to compliment the neighbor on the roast. Thankfully, my autograph manuscript sits safely in the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, proving beyond a doubt that the notes are mine.

A Two-Hundred-Year Nap

After I passed away in 1704, my music slowly slipped out of fashion and my notebooks gathered dust on the library shelves for centuries. My Te Deum Prelude slept quietly in those archives for roughly two hundred and fifty years without a single trumpet player blowing a note of it. Then in 1953, a French musicologist named Carl de Nys went looking through the old collection and rediscovered my manuscript. I like to think the score was just resting its eyes until the twentieth century had invented enough microphones to share it properly.

From Dusty Paper to Spinning Vinyl

Once Carl de Nys dusted off the pages in 1953, the music world wasted no time bringing the piece back to life. That very same year, the conductor Louis Martini stepped up to record it for the French record label Erato. He led the Orchestre de Chambre des Concerts Pasdeloup and the Chorale des Jeunesses Musicales de France in the work's first modern recording. Four years later, in 1957, Walter Kolneder edited the first modern printed score in Vienna for Universal Edition, so musicians everywhere could finally buy a copy.

A Springtime Debut in Montreux

The strangest twist in my story happened in 1954, just a year after that first recording came out. The European Broadcasting Union needed an official signature tune for their new television network, and they fell in love with the opening eight bars of my Prelude. Using an arrangement by Guy Lambert, they broadcast my music live from the Fete des Narcisses in Montreux on the sixth of June, 1954. Not bad for a piece of seventeenth-century church music that had been completely forgotten only two years earlier.

My Unexpected Television Career

Because those opening measures are played before huge international broadcasts like the Eurovision Song Contest and the Vienna New Year's Concert, millions of people now know my tune by heart. Some listeners even assume it was written in the twentieth century as a television jingle, never guessing it started life in a Paris church over two hundred and fifty years before 1954. Today the piece has the widespread nickname of the Eurovision Anthem, which is a title I certainly never heard in the reign of King Louis XIV. Still, I cannot complain at all, because a composer always hopes his music will bring people together for a grand celebration.