Tuba Mirum - Music - Musical Settings

Musical Settings

The words of "Dies Irae" have often been set to music as part of the Requiem service. In some settings, it is broken up into several movements; in such cases, "Dies Irae" refers only to the first of these movements, the others being titled according to their respective first words.

The original setting was a sombre plainchant (or Gregorian chant). In four-line neumatic notation, it begins:

In 5-line staff notation, the same appears:

The earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the Requiem by Johannes Ockeghem does not include a Dies Irae, after this the first polyphonic settings to include the Dies Irae are by Engarandus Juvenis (c. 1490) and Antoine Brumel (1516) to be followed by many composers of the renaissance. Later many notable choral and orchestral settings of the Requiem Mass, including the Dies Irae, were made by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi, Gaetano Donizetti, and Igor Stravinsky.