Alleluia

Alleluia, a short a cappella choral work by the American composer Randall Thompson that premiered on July 8, 1940, at the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center), the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), near Lenox, Massachusetts. It has opened Tanglewood’s summer season every year since that time, and it is one of the most frequently performed pieces of American choral music.

The word alleluia, which is the Latin form of hallelujah (Hebrew: “praise (ye) the Lord”), is used in the context of spoken and sung elements of Christian worship. Thompson’s setting is one of the most loved versions because of its restrained, almost mystical elegance of expression. Given its celebratory title, the listener might well expect the work to be joyous and upbeat, but it is instead quiet and contemplative, its tempo largo. Thompson explained its unusual nature somewhat later, noting that the fall of France to the Nazis just weeks before he wrote the work had dampened his spirits:

The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous…here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Serge Koussevitzky, who was the BSO’s conductor when Tanglewood opened, chose Thompson to provide Tanglewood’s inaugural composition, in part because Harvard University students were scheduled to sing on opening night and Thompson himself was a graduate of Harvard. Preoccupied with another commission, Thompson submitted Alleluia on the very day of its first performance. In fact, when choral director G. Wallace Woodworth finally saw the score, a mere 45 minutes before taking the stage, he noted that it consisted of the oft-repeated word alleluia and the final amen and is said to have told the singers, “Well, text at least is one thing we won’t have to worry about.”