A tradition and practice dating back centuries by which a monarch was welcomed into a loyal city by its dignitaries, clerics, and citizenry, the typical entrée in the hands of the last Valois kings was a spectacular festival, calling on all the creative resources of a city – artists, poets, architects, set designers, composers, and musicians – to produce a visual and aural feast that is generally considered to have given expression to the king’s power. Yet the concluding ceremony that took place in the city’s cathedral, in which a Te Deum was sung, has received almost no attention from scholars. This chapter identifies the liturgy used at this event and considers the role of the psalm central to the ceremony, typically Psalm 19, Exaudiat te Dominus. At the same time, a corollary ceremony, the ‘Te Deum’ was also frequently performed in Paris, it too placing frequently placing Psalm 19 at its center. In contrast to Fogel’s reading of these events, both were as much prayers for the safekeeping of the king in a time of profound national turmoil as they were celebrations of his victories.

The coronation of Louis XIII is generally recognized as a turning point in the history of dynastic continuity. Just hours after his father Henri IV was assassinated, Louis was proclaimed king; this chapter describes, therefore, how Louis XIII’s coronation some weeks later was concerned, for the first time, with more than just marking his accession to the throne. Instead, a complex series of ceremonies reinforced the idea that, like David, Louis acted as an agent of the Holy Spirit. At a ceremony the day before the coronation, he received the sacrament of confirmation at Vespers of the Holy Spirit. During the coronation ceremony itself, he was anointed with oil brought down from heaven by the dove of the Holy Spirit and celebrated the Mass of the Holy Spirit. On the following day, he was inducted as a member and Grand Master of the Knights of the Order of the Holy Spirit. The fiery symbolism of the Holy Spirit found a vivid counterpart in the Phoenix, one of the emblems of the order, understood to reflect the perfect continuity between father and son, and a symbol (along with the flames of the Holy Spirit itself) that underpinned both Louis XIII’s and Louis XIV’s appearances as a fire demon or the sun itself.

It may seem slightly incongruous to look specifically at the liturgical music of James MacMillan, a composer for whom the liturgy has had such bearing on his entire compositional ethos and personal philosophy. For the liturgy has provided the impulse for both MacMillan’s large corpus of sacred choral pieces, and the bulk of his instrumental works. However, this over-riding influence of the liturgy makes an in-depth look at the purely liturgical works all the more relevant: here we find the composer stripped of the myriad of allusions that characterise other works and find him working in a specifically explicit manner. The chapter looks at MacMillan’s extant Mass settings, though will focus mainly on the setting from 2000 as the most succinct appraisal of his assimilating of the vernacular. It will also look at his Magnificat (1999), Nunc Dimittis (2000), Jubilate Deo (2009) and Te Deum settings, showing some of the composer’s current pre-occupations with the borrowing and recycling of material and ideas relating to form and through-composition.

From at least the tenth century, key parts of the Christian liturgy were performed with particularly dramatic rituals, especially on high-ranking feast days in the Church calendar. One of the most ubiquitous texts of this type was the Quem quaeritis dialogue, so-named on account of its text, which sets the Angels’ question ‘Whom do you seek?’ and the Three Marys’s answer ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This liturgical scenario embodies many aspects that modern audiences would associate with theatrical display. Visitatio Sepulchri, MacMillan’s chamber-scale opera (1992–1993) takes the Quem quaeritis narrative and places it within a larger structure that connects it to the Crucifixion and to the Resurrection. The composer uses several medieval chants (the fourteenth-century Parisian liturgy for Easter Day, the Easter sequence Victimae Paschali laudes, and the Te Deum) as well as drawing inspiration from broader aspects of medievalism. This chapter examines the placement, function, and effect of pre-existent chant and other material in Visitatio Sepulchri. It assesses the way in which both musical borrowing and the idea of medieval drama impact upon the creation of the work, on its performance, and on its expressive potential as sacred opera.