Victimae Paschali Laudes is a setting of the Easter sequence for a cappella SATB choir, founded on the ancient Gregorian melody. The chant tune ranges across all the voice parts, and the setting follows it through shifting tonal centers.

The work opens with chant in a Dorian-inflected D minor. The tune travels among voice parts, harmonizing with contrpuntal lines in similar style. The harmony brightens to a D-major cadence at regnat vivus (“reigns alive”). At Dic nobis Maria (“tell us, Mary”) the music turns to G minor, piano e dolce: I imagined a shocked Mary returning from the tomb to the disciples, and them pressing her: What did you see? Tell us! At first she is too stunned to speak. Then she declares, first in the alto line: Sepulcrum Christi viventis, et gloriam vidi resurgentis (“the tomb of the living Christ, and I saw the glory of the resurrection”). As the news spreads, the full choir seizes the phrase and repeats it joyfully.

Following an expansive treatment of precedet suos in Galileam (“he will go before his own into Galilee”), the choir proclaims Scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere (“we know Christ to have truly risen from the dead”), the Latin perfect infinitive carrying the full weight of that certainty using, again, D-major sonorities. Imitative miserere and alleluias follow, based closely on the Gregorian figure that ends the chant, with the work closing on a final Amen.

This setting honors the chant’s antiquity while dramatizing the sequence’s story. The audio sample begins at measure 1. Here are the Latin and English texts: