"I've got cracking on the Te Deum," William Walton wrote to a friend in 1953. "Lots of counter-tenors and little boys Holy-holying, not to mention all the Queen's trumpeters and the side drum." Despite the composer's characteristically irreverent description of the piece, however, Walton's Coronation Te Deum is in fact one of his most straightforward and elegant works. Having been commissioned to compose a musical setting of the liturgical Te Deum for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Walton took the job very seriously. In particular, he tempered his extroverted style considerably, using his trademark subverted tonalities only sparingly. Likewise, he attended several coronation rehearsals in order to assess the skill and scope of the choral and instrumental forces that would be at his disposal. The result is a work that stands out from his oeuvre in those very regards: it adheres to a more traditional sense of harmony and tonal trajectory that we might be accustomed to from Walton; and it utilizes the particular instrumental and architectural circumstances of its premiere through its employment of extensive and effective antiphonal techniques.

In this latter regard we might hear this as a twentieth-century instantiation of the antiphonal choral and instrumental techniques of the Gabrielis at St. Marks in Venice, where in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries singers and players were spread strategically throughout the grand edifice and supplied with music that took advantage of the unique performance space. Likewise, Walton's Te Deum begins with an antiphonal exchange between the orchestra and organ, followed by several passages alternating between various partial and full choruses, and so on until the various forces combine in rich but hushed harmony for the final "Non confundar in aeternum."

Walton's musical gestures conform to the occasion as well. Though not without a few transitory passages of playful modulation, the work initially establishes a solid D major harmony, then moves via several colorful key changes to the tonally traditional antipode of A major; an eventual return to D rounds out the tonal trajectory of the work. Along the way, Walton utilizes harmonic shift to evocative effect: the first modulation from the initial key, for example, is a striking shift upwards to E flat, corresponding with the elevated status of the angels and seraphim described in the text at that point.

The Te Deum received its public premiere at the coronation, which took place on June 2, 1953. The piece, along with Walton's Orb and Scepter, a march also composed for the occasion, were received warmly both by their commissioners and the public. Likewise, Walton himself suspended his usual self-deprecatory judgments on the Coronation Te Deum. "Though I hesitate to hazard an opinion when I am so near to a work," he told a friend a few months before the coronation, "I think it is going to be rather splendid."

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