Imagine yourself to have traveled back in time to around 400 A.D. You’re in the Italian city of Milan, standing in the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, at this point a Roman Catholic church but showing definite signs of its early origins in the Roman Empire. Suddenly you hear a choir of monks start to sing a hymn (I almost wrote “an ancient hymn,” but of course to them it’s brand new) starting with the words “Te Deum.” ‘Hmmm,’ you might think. ‘I’ve sung those words myself in October 2024 with the Cherry Creek Chorale, my own wonderful choir. Cool!’ This (now) ancient hymn is usually dated to around 390 and seen as possibly written by either Saint Ambrose or Saint Augustine. Or perhaps someone else, for all we know. Whoever wrote it, however, surely knew what he (or she!) was doing. Some real heavy hitters over the centuries have taken a crack at it, with one of the most famous being Franz Joseph Haydn in around 1800.
Haydn was a tremendously prolific and popular composer. His output is astonishing: this evening I scrolled through the list of his compositions on Wikipedia, and honestly–I think it probably took me longer to do that than it took Haydn to write the piece. He produced a huge range of compositions, from symphonies to oratorios to string quartets to masses to operas to folk song arrangements to everything else you can possibly imagine. (If there had been MOOG synthesizers around back then, be assured that he’d have written a concerto or two using that instrument.) The composer spent 30 years under the patronage of the Hungarian Prince Esterhazy, who was extremely jealous of Haydn’s time. The patronage was therefore both a blessing and a curse: Haydn had an assured income, but he was also limited in his ability to travel and to take on other commissions. The prince was finally persuaded, however, to allow Haydn to fulfill the request from the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to write her a setting of the “Te Deum.”