From Berlioz's scant extant correspondence with Prosper Sain d'Arod, choirmaster of St.-Sulpice, in the decade of the 1860s it appears that he was commissioned by the latter to compose motets for a large collection of works for women's voices, Le Livre choral. Tantum ergo, Veni creator, and an adaptation of a clavecin piece by François Couperin were published in d'Arod's volume, though the date of its first edition is not ascertainable. Indeed, if an edition of the work was published in Berlioz's lifetime it has not come to light, and the first issue known to us dates from about 1885. Nor are the dates of composition known, though they loom from Berlioz's last years, pervaded by deep melancholy and tormented by physical infirmity. Berlioz's attitude to religion was enigmatic. His earliest memories were colored by the modal psalmody of rural Catholic services, and one of his most persistent obsessions was the musical depiction of Judgment Day, a vein already evident in the Messe solenelle (1825) and which blossomed richly in the Requiem (1837) and the Te Deum (1849). Sweet, trusting innocence also appealed to him, as in L'Enfance du Christ (1854) or his joyously serene setting of religious verses by Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) in the Prière du matin (1846). Lamartine's verse was one of the pillars of the Romantic movement, and his alternations of questioning and faithful, innocent trust set the tone for much of Romanticism's approach to religion. For instance, his volume of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1839) inspired Berlioz's friend Franz Liszt (1811-1886) to the composition of an ambitious and like-titled collection of piano works, including the pristine Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (sketched in 1845). But even if one accounts for these predilections as staples of Romantic sensibility, they are difficult to square with the oft-professed, acidly eloquent, and frequently outrageous expressions of atheism that run throughout Berlioz's correspondence and Memoirs, the latter prefaced by Macbeth's "Life's but a walking shadow...a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." Was it a supreme irony or a gentle homecoming that what were almost certainly Berlioz's last compositions were suavely devotional? Or was he simply drawn to the sound of women's voices in a favorite mode of supplication? In three closely worked parts, two sopranos and contralto, alternating tutti and solo, with an integral organ accompaniment, the Tantum ergo is a brisk—Andante (décidé et sans lenteur)—traversal of the traditional Latin text attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, carried out with an old-masterly deftness and expressively limned simplicity that bear comparison with Mozart's Ave verum corpus, graced with an aftertaste of sweetness and rounded with a brief fugal coda on Amen. Tantum ergo may well be Berlioz's final composition.

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