Office

Holy Saturday, two o'clock in the morning. In churches and chapels throughout Christendom, the Passion of Christ is commemorated at the Offices of Matins and Lauds. As this long and fatiguing liturgy advances, the candles are progressively extinguished, until total darkness reigns after the Miserere… This dramatic tableau is that of the Office of Tenebrae, a ceremonial unchanged since the Middle Ages which inspired some of the most moving pieces in the whole sacred repertory, notably settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah - which under the name of 'Leçons de ténèbres' were to become a major genre of French Baroque music. In the sixteenth century, at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the service was sung to the Lamentations of Cristóbal de Morales (1500-53), the 'light of Spain' who himself became a singer in this illustrious establishment. It is this magnificent, uniquely compelling music that Doulce Mémoire use as the basis for a new liturgical reconstruction, following on from their Requiem pour les Rois de France . As Denis Raisin-Dadre says: This music speaks to us of time, of time that is immobile, contemplative, extraordinarily concentrated… We have striven to recapture the emotion it engendered, its spirituality, through a search for absolute sincerity.