Te Deum Laudamus (Sullivan) - Analysis and Criticism

Analysis and Criticism

The Boer War Te Deum was Sullivan's last-completed major work. The text is the ancient Christian hymn as translated in the Book of Common Prayer, showing Sullivan's "personal Christian commitment" at the end of his life. In addition, his use of his popular hymn tune, "St. Gertrude," throughout the Te Deum is the most prominent self-reference that Sullivan allowed himself in his career, underlining the very personal nature of this final work and his love of his church and country. Benedict Taylor wrote that unlike Sullivan's earlier Festival Te Deum,

the work is relatively subdued, more self-effacing, concise and emotionally subtly-tinged.... A compact, single movement work of about a quarter-of-an-hour's duration... musical sections corresponding to the traditional divisions of the liturgical text run into one another without break. A degree of unity across the sectional, evolving structure is provided by cyclic features... and the use of common or related material for successive sections.... Of possibly even greater structural cohesion is the pervasiveness of march-like figures throughout the work, principally rhythmic but often also employing repeated notes or arpeggiac figures characteristic of the hymn tune 'St Gertrude'.... It is a work whose grandeur and restrained dignity have made it cherished and esteemed....

Contemporary critics also reviewed the piece favourably. The Daily Telegraph wrote, "Then the Service reached its central episode with the Te Deum sung to Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music, deprived, through the absence of strings, of its full orchestral beauty, but wrought up from exquisite tenderness to a pitch of dignity and strength." Note the reference in the previous quote to the absence of strings: The cathedral was unable to procure a suitable string section, and so the Te Deum was premiered without strings. The Musical Times was also favourably impressed by the piece:

In every page of the score we can trace the hand of the skilled musician, once a Chorister of the Chapel Royal. Moreover the work is impregnated with a robustness distinctly national in the directness of its diatonic expression. The introduction of the composer's familiar hymn tune 'Onward Christian Soldiers' — first in fragments and afterwards in its entirety — infuses a military element into this Thanksgiving Te Deum, the significance of which is obvious.