Charles Villiers Stanford: Te Deum; Elegiac Ode

Description

By the time Stanford had received a commission from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival to write a choral work for them in 1884, he had, at the age of 32, already begun to assert himself as one of Britain's leading composers. The Elegiac Ode was, however, his first mature foray into the world of major British choral festivals. The words were taken from the last part of Whitman's elegy, 'When lilacs in the dooryard bloom'd', written in the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. Taking the seven verses of the burial hymn, Stanford divided his chosen text into four parts, thereby creating a four-movement musical structure more akin to a choral symphony with its substantial (and thematically related) choral outer movements flanking two shorter inner essays. Stanford's large-scale setting of the Te Deum Op. 66 was first sung at the Leeds Festival on 6 October 1898 and its ambitious, opulent dimensions were clearly intended to be a fitting commemoration of the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria (its dedicatee) sixty years earlier as well as a tribute to the full-bodied, well-trained Leeds chorus of 350 singers.