Here is a very beautiful setting of Christe, Redemptor omnium, the hymn for Matins and both Vespers of the feast of All Saints, by the mighty Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), in alternating chant and polyphony. The text is the original version, traditionally attributed to the great Benedictine scholar Bl Rabanus Maurus (780 ca. - 856), since Victoria’s work predates the revision of the Office hymnal promulgated by Pope Urban VIII in 1629. (Both hymns for All Saints were so drastically altered by this revision as to effectively be completely new.) The text can be read in Latin and English at the following link: https://www.liturgies.net/saints/allsaints/eveningprayeri.htm.
The original version was restored in the Liturgy of the Hours, but with one notable exception. The sixth stanza of the original reads as follows:
Gentem auferte perfidam
Credentium de finibus,
Ut Christo laudes debitas
Persolvamus alacriter.
“Remove the unbelieving nation / from the lands of the believers, / that readily we may offer / due praises to Christ.” With that sad naivety by which so many people in the later 1960s deceived themselves into believing that the peaceable settlement of post-WW2 western Europe would last forever, the first two lines of this stanza were suppressed, and the other two moved to the end as part of a new doxology.
Sit Trinitati gloria,Credentium de finibus,
Ut Christo laudes debitas
Persolvamus alacriter.
“Remove the unbelieving nation / from the lands of the believers, / that readily we may offer / due praises to Christ.” With that sad naivety by which so many people in the later 1960s deceived themselves into believing that the peaceable settlement of post-WW2 western Europe would last forever, the first two lines of this stanza were suppressed, and the other two moved to the end as part of a new doxology.
Vestrasque voces jungite,
Ut Christo laudes debitas
Persolvamus alacriter.
“To the Trinity be glory / and join your voices, / that readily we may offer / due praises to Christ.”
The Magnificat antiphon for Second Vespers.
Aña O quam gloriósum est regnum* in quo cum Christo gaudent omnes Sancti, amicti stolis albis sequuntur Agnum quocumque íerit! (O how glorious is the kingdom in which all the Saints rejoice with Christ; clothed in white robes, they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.)
A very impressive setting of this text as a motet by William Byrd.
This same text is one of Victoria’s most famous motets, and the basis of one of his best “parody” Masses, the Missa O quam gloriosum. (The term “parody” does not of course mean mockery, but that the motet is used as the thematic basis of the Mass.)
