Dies irae

• 1. Introduction

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  Dies irae, Latin for the Day of Wrath, opens with a warning that one day will dissolve the world in ashes. It is a medieval poem about the Last Judgment, built from rhymed lines that lean on stress rather than syllable counts. Few tunes have been borrowed by as many composers as its melody. Yet nobody can say for certain who wrote the words. The church that sang them at funerals for centuries eventually set them aside. How did a hymn at least as old as the 13th century become musical shorthand for death? And what does the speaker of the poem actually beg from the Judge he describes?

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• 2. Disputed Authorship

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  Thomas of Celano, a Franciscan who lived from 1200 to 1265, is one of two men most often credited with the Dies irae. The other is Latino Malabranca Orsini, who died in 1294. He was lector at the Dominican house of study at Santa Sabina in Rome, the forerunner of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum.

  Gregory the Great, who died in 604, is among the older figures to whom some sources credit the poem. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Bonaventure (1221-1274) have been named as well. The safest claim is that the sequence dates from the 13th century at the latest, and it may be much older.

  A manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III at Naples gives the firmest anchor. It is a Franciscan calendar missal that carries the text, with slight variations in wording. Its date can be narrowed to the years 1253-1255. The calendar omits Clare of Assisi, who was canonized in 1255, and her name would have been included in any later book.

  Whoever the author was, the poem leans heavily on older writings, and its very first stanza points to two of them.

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• 3. Borrowed Images

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  David and the Sibyl stand together as witnesses in the poem's opening stanza, a pairing of a biblical king with a figure from outside scripture. The main inspiration appears to be the Vulgate translation of Sophonias, better known as Zephaniah, chapter 1, verses 15-16.

  Revelation 20:11-15 supplies the book from which the world will be judged. Matthew 25:31-46 supplies the sheep and the goats, the right hand, and the contrast between the blessed and the accursed doomed to flames. The trumpet comes from 1 Thessalonians 4:16. Second Peter 3:7 gives heaven and earth burnt by fire. Luke 21:26 gives men fainting with fear as they see the Son of Man coming.

  The Jewish prayer Unetanneh Tokef also appears to be related. It calls the day "awesome and terrible" and speaks of the great trumpet being sounded.

  Those pieces are assembled across nineteen stanzas whose rhyme scheme changes just before the end.

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• 4. Form and Plea

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  Nineteen stanzas make up the text in the 1962 Roman Missal, and most are rhyming triplets. The lines rely on stress accents and rhyme, and the metre is trochaic, a falling beat that starts on a strong syllable.

  The opening stanzas stage the event. The Judge is about to come, and he will examine everything strictly. The trumpet scatters a wondrous sound through the sepulchres of every region and summons all before the throne. Death and nature marvel as the creature rises to answer. A written book is brought forward, and when the Judge sits, whatever lies hidden appears. Nothing will remain unpunished.

  In the seventh stanza, the speaker steps forward in his own voice. What shall I, poor wretch, say? Which patron shall I ask, when even the just are hardly secure? He calls on the King of fearsome majesty to save him, and he reminds Jesus that he is the cause of Christ's journey. Seeking him, Christ sat down tired, and the speaker begs that such hardship not be in vain. He recalls that Mary was absolved and the robber was heard, and says this gave hope to him as well. He admits his prayers are not worthy, kneels with a heart crushed like ashes, and asks for care at his end.

  The last two stanzas, Lacrimosa and Pie Iesu, break the pattern. Lacrimosa trades the triplets for two rhyming couplets and pictures a guilty man rising from glowing embers. Pie Iesu gives up rhyme for assonance, matching vowel sounds, and its lines are catalectic, meaning cut short. Some scholars think both were added to suit the poem to liturgical use. The final request is no longer for the speaker but for the dead: grant them rest.

  That closing couplet, Pie Iesu, has often been reused as an independent song.

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• 5. Mass and Reform

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  The Roman Missal of 1962 was the last edition before the revisions that followed the Second Vatican Council, and it still carries the Dies irae as the sequence of the Requiem Mass. The sequence held that place for centuries, as the settings by Mozart and Verdi make clear. It is still heard wherever the Tridentine Latin liturgy is celebrated, and it was also part of the older liturgy for All Souls' Day.

  Three years of indulgence once attached to each recitation of the prayer. An indulgence is a grant by the church that reduces the penalty owed for sin. Reciting the prayer daily for a month earned a plenary indulgence. The Manual of Indulgences did not renew that grant.

  In 1969-70, the Consilium for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Liturgy, the Vatican body charged with drafting the reforms, eliminated the sequence from funerals and other Masses for the Dead. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, a leading figure of the reforms, explained the thinking. The Consilium dropped texts that, in his words, "smacked of a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages." Libera me, Domine went as well, along with others that overemphasized judgment, fear and despair. In their place came texts urging Christian hope.

  The reforms of 1969-1971 did not erase the poem entirely. Slightly edited, it remains in use ad libitum, meaning optionally, as a hymn in the Liturgy of the Hours on All Souls' Day and in the last week before Advent. Stanza 19 was deleted, and the rest was divided into three parts: stanzas 1-6 for the Office of Readings, 7-12 for Lauds and 13-18 for Vespers.

  One line in stanza 13 also changed. Qui Mariam absolvisti, meaning "You who absolved Mary," became Peccatricem qui solvisti, meaning "You who absolved the sinful woman." Modern scholarship denies the common medieval identification of the woman taken in adultery with Mary Magdalene, so Mary could no longer be named.

  A doxology follows stanzas 6, 12 and 18. Its first words, O tu, Deus majestatis, ask the God of majesty to join the singers with the blessed.

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• 6. Translations and Literary Echoes

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  William Josiah Irons translated the poem into English in 1849, matching the original rhyme and metre even though he worked from a slightly different Latin text. An edited version, brought closer to the official Latin, is approved by the Catholic Church as the funeral Mass sequence in the ordinariates for former Anglicans. An English version also appears in various Anglican Communion service books.

  John Newton made a very loose Protestant version. The Polish poet Jan Kasprowicz wrote his own hymn titled Dies irae about the day of judgment. Its first six lines follow the original metre and rhyme, and its first stanza translates as "The trumpet will cast a wondrous sound."

  Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, published a satiric version in his 1903 book Shapes of Clay. It keeps the original metre but turns the language humorous and sardonic. Around 1800, the Reverend Bernard Callan (1750-1804), an Irish priest and poet, translated the hymn into Gaelic. His version appears in a Gaelic prayer book, The Spiritual Rose.

  Walter Scott used the first two stanzas in the sixth canto of his narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took the first, sixth and seventh stanzas for the scene "Cathedral" in the first part of his drama Faust in 1808. Oscar Wilde's "Sonnet on Hearing the Dies Iræ Sung in the Sistine Chapel," printed in his Poems of 1881, sets the hymn's "terrors of red flame and thundering" against images of "life and love."

  In Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, Erik has the chant displayed on the wall of his funereal bedroom. The 1964 novel Deus Iræ, by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, takes its title and major theme from the poem. Two years later, Dick's novel Ubik uses the English translation verbatim.

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• 7. Requiem Settings and Quotations

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  Johannes Ockeghem wrote the earliest surviving polyphonic Requiem, and it leaves out the Dies irae entirely. Engarandus Juvenis in 1490 and Antoine Brumel in 1516 produced the first polyphonic settings that include it. Many composers of the Renaissance followed them. Later, Charpentier, Delalande, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Britten and Stravinsky all wrote notable choral and orchestral Requiems with the sequence.

  Some settings split the poem into several movements. In those, the name Dies irae belongs only to the first movement, and the others are named after their opening words. Giovanni Battista Martini ended his set of 303 canons, most of them humorous, with 20 canons on extracts from the sequence.

  The original Gregorian setting, from the 13th century, is a sombre plainchant in the Dorian mode. Hector Berlioz brought it widespread recognition by using it in his Symphonie fantastique. From then on, especially in the 19th century, the tune was associated with death and terror.

  Franz Liszt quoted it in his Totentanz of 1849. Camille Saint-Saëns used it in Danse Macabre, and Modest Mussorgsky placed it in "Trepak," the third of his Songs and Dances of Death, from 1875. Gustav Mahler drew on it in the first and fifth movements of his Symphony No. 2. Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 2 in A minor, from 1839, is sometimes called "Presentiment to Death." Gustav Holst quoted it in "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age," from The Planets.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff returned to the melody again and again, from his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1891 to his Symphonic Dances in 1940. Isle of the Dead in 1908 and The Bells in 1913 are among the works that quote it. Aram Khachaturian drew on it in concertos for piano, violin and cello and in two symphonies.

  Gottfried Huppertz was already carrying the tune into the cinema, in his score for Metropolis in 1927.

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• 8. Screens, Stages and Stereos

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  Bernard Herrmann quoted the chant in the main theme of Citizen Kane in 1941. He used it again in Jason and the Argonauts in 1963, during the scene in which the hydra's teeth are scattered. The tune became a fixture of horror. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind built the opening theme of The Shining in 1980 around it, and The Newton Brothers revisited it for the sequel, Doctor Sleep, in 2019. Jerry Goldsmith used it in Poltergeist in 1982, and Harry Manfredini in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives in 1986.

  John Williams reached for the melody in very different moods. It underlies the "Old Man Marley" leitmotif in Home Alone in 1990. In 1977 he quoted it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, when Luke discovers that Imperial Stormtroopers have killed his uncle and aunt. Danny Elfman placed it in "Making Christmas" from The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993.

  Howard Shore turned the melody into the leitmotif of the Nazgûl in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is most prominent when the Witch-king summons the armies of Mordor from Minas Morgul. Hans Zimmer used it in "The Rightful King" from The Lion King, in "Rock House Jail" from The Rock, and in "House Atreides" from the 2021 Dune adaptation.

  On the stage, Stephen Sondheim quoted it in Sweeney Todd in 1979, in "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and in the accompaniment to "Epiphany." Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz used passages from the first and second stanzas as lyrics in "The Bells of Notre Dame" for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996. Jonathan Larson quoted it, lyrics included, in "La Vie Bohème" from Rent, also in 1996.

  Led Zeppelin drew on it in "Stairway to Heaven" on Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. Jethro Tull based the instrumental "Elegy," from their twelfth studio album Stormwatch, on the melody. Bathory used it on Blood Fire Death in 1988, and Queensrÿche open "Suite Sister Mary" on Operation: Mindcrime with its verses.

  Jacques Brel's "La Mort," from 1959, takes its verse melody and several instrumental phrases from the tune. English listeners know it as "My Death," which Scott Walker covered on Scott in 1967.

  In 2025 alone, the melody surfaced in several places. Christopher Larkin used it in Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Lorien Testard in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The Saja Boys' "Your Idol" in KPop Demon Hunters carries it, and Michael Giacchino quoted it in the maze bulldozer scene of Zootopia 2.

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