medieval liturgical songs, and a very late one. It may even be a thirteenth-century composition, for the text
is attributed to Thomas of Celano (d. ca. 1255), a disciple and biographer of St. Francis of Assisi.
Thomas’s poem is a kind of meditation or gloss in rhymed three-line stanzas (tercets) on the second verse
—“Dies illa, dies irae”—of the responsory Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna (“Deliver me, O Lord,
from eternal death”), which is sung at the graveside service that follows the Requiem Mass. Even the
melody begins as a parody (or gloss, or takeoff—but not a trope, except in the loosest possible use of the
term) on that of the responsory verse (Ex. 3-8).
EX. 3-8 Libera me (responsory verse)Like Rex caeli (Ex. 2-1), in its full form the Dies irae has a melodic repetition scheme that exceeds
the normal allotment of a sequence. (There can be no doubt about its status, though, because within the
actual liturgy it occupies the place and accomplishes the business of a sequence.) Its three paired
versicles go through a triple cursus—a threefold repetition like that of a litany:
AABBCC/AABBCC/AABBC, with the last C replaced by a final couplet, to which an additional
unrhymed couplet and an Amen were added by an anonymous reviser. (Ex. 3-7b contains only the first
cursus.) The various constituent phrases have many internal repetitions as well: the second phrase of B,
for example, is an embellished variant of the responsory-derived opening phrase of A, which (like the
opening acclamation in Kyrie “Cum jubilo”) thus assumes the role of a refrain.
Once again, as by now we may expect to find in a late medieval Dorian chant, the melody delineates
the principal parts of the mode with great clarity. The A phrase occupies the Hypodorian ambitus, minus
the highest note; the B phrase stakes out the upper tetrachord (but again minus the highest note); and the C
phrase sinks back into Hypodorian space (this is, after all, a funereal chant). Only the final couplet (on
“judicandus....”) manages to reach the top of the authentic octave, vouchsafing a mode 1 classification for
the melody. Until the “coda,” moreover, with a pair of half cadences on A (the mode 1 tuba), every one of
the melody’s frequent cadences has been to the final, imparting an additional, very heavy-treaded,
dimension of repetition.
Despite its formal peculiarities, the Dies irae is a very typical late sequence in its verse structure. By
the middle of the twelfth century, rhymed tercets composed of eightsyllable lines with regularly alternated
accent patterns were very much the norm, not only for sequences but for new Office formularies as well.
This verse pattern (especially in a modified tercet with syllable count 8 + 8 + 7) is often associated with
Adam Precentor, alias Adam of St. Victor (d. 1146) a much-venerated Parisian churchman and an
“outstanding versifier” (egregius versificator) who is credited with churning out between forty and
seventy sequences of this type, most of them set to a small repertory of stereotyped and interchangeable
tunes. These sequences were composed not only for the Augustinian abbey of St. Victor, where Adam was
resident, but also for the newly consecrated Cathedral of Notre Dame, where he served as cantor. The
most famous melody associated with Adam is the Mixolydian tune to which St. Thomas Aquinas’s
sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem (“Praise the Savior, O Zion”) is still sung at traditional Catholic
churches on the feast of Corpus Christi. In Ex. 3-9 the first two melodic phrases are given both with St.
Thomas Aquinas’s words and with Adam’s original poem, Laudes crucis attollamus (“Praises to the