A Joyful Return to Benjamin Britten’s Jubilate Deo

For Sunday, August 31, 2025
Jubilate Deo by Benjamin Britten

By David Jolliffe

The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer was most recently revised in 1979, and if I remember correctly (I had just become an Episcopal chorister in 1975), during the run-up to that date, congregations were allowed a bit of leeway in the shape of the liturgy they used for the main Sunday morning service.  For example, instead of beginning the service with the Word of God followed by the Holy Communion itself (as we do now) a congregation could opt to celebrate the entire Morning Prayer service and then the Holy Communion.  As I recall, once the revised prayer book had been adopted, such ecclesiastical switcheroos were frowned up, if not proscribed.

As much as I love our current liturgy (and I do, deeply), I miss one thing about the aforementioned alteration. The Morning Prayer allows ample opportunities to sing one or more  of the brief songs known simply as the Canticles:  the Venite, Exultemus Domino (which begins “Oh come, let us sing unto the Lord”), the Te Deum (which begins “We praise thee, O Lord”), the Benedicite, omnia opera (which begins “O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord”) and the Jubilate Deo (which begins “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands”).

At the 11 a.m. service on August 31, the St. Paul’s Choir will offer a joyful return to one of the canticles by singing Benjamin Britten’s rousing Jubilate Deo in C as its anthem.  Britten, a British composer who lived from 1913 to 1976, got into the “writing service music” mode as a young man, composing a setting of the Te Deum and the Jubilate Deo in E in 1934.  Little did he know that 27 years later he would be allowed another opportunity to create a setting of the Jubilate Deo.  In 1961, Prince Philip commissioned Britten to write the Jubilate Doe in C for the choir at the chapel of Windsor Castle.  The prince was so taken with Britten’s composition that asked to have the canticle sung every year on or near his birthday; and he requested it be performed at his funeral in 2021.

The text is a paraphrase of Psalm 100:

Psalm 100

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
    Worship the Lord with gladness;
    come into his presence with singing.

Know that the Lord is God.
    It is he that made us, and we are his;
    we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
    and his courts with praise.
    Give thanks to him, bless his name.

For the Lord is good;
    his steadfast love endures forever,
    and his faithfulness to all generations.

Listeners will find joy in abundance in Britten’s soaring choral passages, and the organ accompaniment is so rich with trills and tweets that one can imagine songbirds chirping along.  The middle of the Jubilate Deo contains a richly meditative passage derived from verse 4 of the Psalm, and then the piece concludes with a return to its fecund joy.