42 - 1919: Strasbourg, the Sinfonia sacra, Symphonie antique, and ancient themes

Summary

After the war, I went to Strasbourg to participate in the first French concert given again in the Palais des Fêtes [Sängerhaus]—the same hall where I had inaugurated the organ before the war with my Sinfonia sacra [op. 81] and that I re-inaugurated in a way with my Symphonie antique [op. 83], a work built on the admirable themes of the Te Deum and Lauda Sion.

Why is it that French organists with a talent for composition do not use more of these old legendary themes? For five centuries, the first Christian bishops carefully sorted out what were the most characteristic of the ancient (Greek) chants. Who were the authors of these melodies? No one can say. One of the most beautiful cries that has ever come from a human chest is the intonation of the Te Deum. Whose is it? Once heard, it cannot be forgotten. A legend has wanted it to be by the greatest poet of all time and has attributed it to Sophocles on the eve of Salamis. He was twenty-one years old, a citharist, chorus master, and lyric poet. Inundated by the horde of Persians ten times more numerous than the Greek army, and stunned by the victory, he would thus have sung: do mi sol la la la sol … exhaling his soul in this sublime cry that belongs to two modes at the same time in the same tonality. What is true about this? We cannot say.

I questioned my colleagues from the Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on this subject, and their opinion is that the composition of the words of the Te Deum should rather be attributed to another legend, which would give the authorship to Saint Ambrose or Saint Augustine. The same literary text is said to be the work of a fourth-century bishop living on the banks of the Danube, in Teresina, today Nea Palanqua.

What a misfortune for humanity! We have nothing in Saint Augustine's works announcing a music treatise De musica for the good reason that he never wrote it, despite his advertisement for this work. The only treatise we have is one on the prosody of verse. How is it that we have nothing of the popular hymns from Athens, Rome, Egypt, Palestine, or Babylon? At the Louvre Museum we have almost all the old instruments, but no texts.