Elgar began composition of his Te Deum and Benedictus shortly after the completion of The Banner of St. George. The work bears a dedication to George Sinclair, organist at Hereford Cathedral, from whom Elgar received the commission. Sinclair intended the work to serve as the centerpiece of the 1897 Three Choirs' Festival, which was to be held at Hereford. It was here that the work was premiered, on 12 September of that year, during the opening service of the festival, under Sinclair's direction.

Scored for chorus and orchestra, the Te Deum and Benedictus is not a work intended for inclusion in services or worship. Instead, as the nature of the premier would seem to indicate, it was conceived of as a work of a grand, festive nature, more at home on the concert stage or in highly ceremonial settings than in the solemnity of worship. Considered by many at the time to be daringly modern, the Morning Post wrote, in its review of the premier, that "for the most part the music indeed is more suggestive of a warlike song of triumph than an expression of Christian praise and prayer." Elgar's inclusion, at the end of the manuscript version of the full score, of the words "Inter spem et metum" (Between hope and fear), seems to confirm this interpretation. As is indicated by the title, Elgar chose his text from two separate morning canticles, the Te Deum, a hymn of thanksgiving, and the Benedictus, the traditional text of dismissal, which he then combined into a single work of approximately 20 minutes in length, an idea that presumably came from Sinclair. Within the structure of the work itself, strong contrasts of loud and soft are employed to highlight the various moods of the text. Fantastic moments of praise are sharply contrasted with more introverted periods, as the text turns prayerful.

The work begins with a rhythmically insistent orchestral introduction, before the chorus enters with the Te Deum text, which, due to a relative lack of textual repetition, is presented rather quickly. The Benedictus material is presented in a more lyric 12/8 meter. Elgar achieves further contrast by presenting much of the choral material without the benefit of orchestral accompaniment. A quickening of the tempo is accompanied by hints of a recapitulation of the Te Deum thematic material. Upon the completion of the Benedictus text, the mood of the Te Deum again becomes dominant. Elgar brings down the curtain in characteristic fashion with a rising scale of triplets.

Although finely composed in its own right, the Te Deum and Benedictus is perhaps more significant in terms of the impact of the commission upon the composer's career than for purely musical considerations, for it brought Elgar into contact not only with Sinclair, but also with August Jaeger, the publishing office manager at Novello who was to become the chief proponent of Elgar's music at that venerable English publishing house. Lady Elgar described Jaeger as being "quite enthusiastic as he shd, be over E's music for Hereford." Elgar responded to Jaeger's praise in a letter saying "You praise my new work too much- But you understand it." For his part, Jaeger took a special trip from Huddersfield to attend the premier. After the performance, he wrote "I too can appreciate a good thing and see genius in musicians that are not yet dead." Elgar later paid tribute to both Jaeger and Sinclair by recognizing them in his Enigma Variations. Jaeger, in particular, was singled out for special recognition in the finest of the "Enigma" movements, the "Nimrod" variation.



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