Te Deum, an expansive, elegiac work for SATB chorus, organ, and optional trumpet, counts among Benjamin Britten's earliest works. Composed in 1934 (when the composer was barely 21 years old), the work emerged just as the precocious composer was gaining acclaim both at home and abroad, and it demonstrates the qualities that his early audiences found so appealing. Though not among Britten's most complicated scores (having been written for performance at St. Mark's Church in London), it exemplifies the composer's gift for lucid but innovative harmonies, expressive nuance, and dynamic choral textures. One immediately notices in this piece how frequently Britten's textures shift and how each gesture is attuned to the text it conveys. Britten rarely settles into a pattern for long and avoids fitting the Te Deum text (sung in English, proper to the Anglican service) to a preconceived musical mold. Rather, the music continually adjusts to the phonetic and semantic contours of the words. The opening of the piece assembles itself slowly, with quiet, imitative lines that gradually come into focus and grow in intensity above a distinctive organ countermelody, while, as is characteristic of Britten, the natural declamation of the text dictates the flow and rhythm of the melody. This crests as "Cherubim and Serpahim," in a series of pointed chordal articulations, exclaim "Holy! Holy! Holy!" The subsequent passages employ a technique used extensively in Britten's later choral music and operas, extracting key words from the sequence of the text—in this case, the recurring phrase "praise Thee"—adorning them with long melismas and overlapping them onto the remaining lines of verse. A similar effect is used during the soprano's extended solo, underscored by choral reiterations. Shifts of character happen with an exhilarating unexpectedness, such as the moment where, after uttering the names of the Godhead in strong, stately unison, the choir intones the word "Comforter" with suddenly lush, languorous harmonies that winnow to a whisper. Elsewhere, Britten pulls the listener in the opposite direction, when the tight articulations and see-saw leaps on the phrase "Day by day we magnify thee" are interrupted by a pause, then answered with a dazzling, sustained polytonal harmony on "and we worship thy name...." The piece ends almost as it began, with echoes of the organ countermelody and imitative contrapuntal vocal textures that slowly settle into the hushed sustenance of the final chord.

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