Victimae Paschali Laudes is a setting of the Easter sequence for a cappella SATB choir, founded on the ancient chant melody. I learned that chant from David Bergeron when he and Nina were music directors at Holy Rosary Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts, my parish of origin; years later I set it for David’s choir at the Unitarian Universalist church in Gloucester, where I lived just across the street on Church Street. The piece is dedicated to that choir.

The chant tune ranges across all the voice parts, and the setting follows it through shifting tonal centers. It opens in a Dorian-inflected D minor. At Dic nobis Maria (“tell us, Mary”) the music turns to G minor, piano e dolce: I imagined Mary returning from the tomb to the disciples in shock, 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 forte. 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. Gregorian miserere and alleluias follow, closing on a final Amen.

A setting that honors the chant’s antiquity while dramatizing the sequence’s story, for an a cappella SATB choir. The audio sample begins at measure 1.

Here are the Latin and English texts: