Dies Irae

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Dies Irae — “day of wrath” — is a Latin sequence on the Last Judgment, a rhymed poem of some fifty-odd lines that became, for seven centuries, a fixed part of the Requiem Mass, the Catholic Mass for the dead. Its subject is the end of the world rendered as a single scene: the trumpet sounding across the graves, the dead summoned to the throne, the written book in which everything is recorded, and the soul pleading to be counted among the saved rather than the damned. The tone is not consolation but dread, then a turn toward mercy.

The poem dates from the thirteenth century and is most often attributed to Thomas of Celano, the Franciscan who also wrote the earliest life of Francis of Assisi. The attribution is traditional rather than secure; scholarship treats the authorship as unsettled, and the text may draw on older responsory material. What is clearer is its diffusion: by the later Middle Ages the sequence had entered the funeral liturgy across Latin Christendom, and the Roman Missal of 1570 fixed it there. Its trochaic triple rhyme — Dies irae, dies illa, / solvet saeclum in favilla — made it among the most quoted of all medieval Latin hymns.

What carried it furthest was not the words but the melody. The plainchant set to the sequence is a stark, descending phrase, and composers from the Renaissance onward wove it into their settings of the Requiem; Mozart, Berlioz, and Verdi each made the Dies Irae a centerpiece of theirs. By the nineteenth century the chant had escaped the liturgy altogether. Berlioz quoted it in the Symphonie fantastique to summon a witches’ sabbath, and from there it passed into the common stock of Western music as a recognizable token of death and the macabre — heard in concert works and, later, in film scores, often by listeners with no idea of its origin.

Within the Church the sequence’s standing changed sharply in the twentieth century. The liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council removed the Dies Irae from the ordinary Requiem, on the reasoning that its emphasis on terror and judgment sat uneasily with a renewed stress on Christian hope and resurrection. It survives in the older Latin rites and in the concert repertoire, and the medieval melody endures wherever a composer wants to mark mortality in a few notes.

The poem belongs to a wider medieval preoccupation with the four last things — death, judgment, heaven, hell — and with the moment when private life is opened to a final reckoning. Its persistence outside the liturgy is its own quiet measure of how completely that imagery, and the bare phrase that carries it, lodged in the Western imagination.

→ Related: Gloria In Excelsis Deo · Gloria Patri · Middle Ages