If the composer’s testimony is to be believed, it was an “inner spiritual necessity” that inspired Igor Stravinsky to set the complete Latin text of the Mass in the years after the Second World War. Stravinsky’s setting of this text surprised many onlookers, not because it was a religious text—the former enfant terrible of music had returned to the practice of his faith in the 1920s—but because Stravinsky, a Russian Orthodox believer, was setting the liturgical text in a language that was not used in his own church. Stravinsky’s ambition was to add his own setting to the long history of works for the Catholic liturgy; he carefully notated the priest’s sung parts into the score, which he hoped would be performed within an actual celebration of the Mass (the actual premiere performance, ironically enough, was not in a church but at La Scala, the famous Milanese opera house). At the center of the work is the text of the Nicene Creed. Quietly and unemphatically, against a background of luminous chords played by accompanying wind instruments, the choir rhythmically intones the Christological definitions of the Council of Nicaea. In a conversation with Evelyn Waugh about his Mass, Stravinsky was characteristically laconic: “The Credo is the longest movement. There is much to believe.”
St. Athanasius tells us that the doctrines of Arianism were spread through music, and that Arius himself composed catchy songs summarizing his teachings against the divinity and co-eternity of the Son. The Arian catchphrase “There was when he was not” was not merely an erroneous doctrinal conclusion but the central idea of a musical repertory that was being taught to lay people. So it was almost inevitable that the Nicene confutation of Arianism would produce music of its own, teaching Christians who might have been misled by Arian music-making to praise the Son as consubstantial with the Father. If it sometimes seems odd today that we should be singing about such things, this is because the teaching of Nicaea has become part of the history of doctrine, its polemical significance no longer immediately apparent; the average churchgoer probably does not think much about the meaning of words like “consubstantial,” or ask what the alternative to such language might be. But one hopes that the longstanding practice of singing the Nicene Creed might at least teach such churchgoers to recognize the grammar with which Christian orthodoxy speaks of Christ. There is something comforting in the knowledge that, if all other knowledge of the Council of Nicaea had been lost, its essential teachings could be reconstructed from any music library.
No one should be surprised, then, to find Christians singing songs about the technicalities of Trinitarian doctrine. What might surprise an observer, however, is the form that this singing has taken. The Nicene Creed does not seem to have been intended for musical setting, and its liturgical use at the Eucharist was not universal for many centuries after the council that produced it. As a distinctly nonpoetic text—an orderly prose list of doctrinal propositions separated by the conjunction “and”—the Creed was hardly tailor-made as a replacement for the catchy melodies in the Thalia of Arius. If one wanted to look for an obvious Nicene equivalent to the “dinner-party songs” of Arius, better candidates would be the hymns written by Hilary of Poitiers or Ambrose of Milan, sophisticated poetic compositions designed to teach the doctrine of Nicaea to a wide audience. Yet although St. Ambrose’s hymns are still used in the Catholic Liturgy of the Hours and have been translated into many languages, they have had nowhere near the same reach in the history of music as the Nicene Creed. Arranged as a simple chant for congregational singing, paraphrased in the form of a hymn, or set for choir and orchestra as the central movement of a Mass, the Nicene Creed is one of the most frequently set texts in the history of sacred music.
Not every composer, however, has appreciated the task of setting the Creed to music. Julian Anderson, the composer of two recent choral mass settings, has omitted the Credo in both of them; in an interview, he explained that his “problem with the Creed” for musical setting is the “laundry-list aspect of it.” This omission is typical; the majority of new choral settings of the Mass today do not include a Credo, and the title Missa brevis—“short Mass,” which once designated a complete setting of the Mass that was set to music in a concise way—now is typically used for a composition that includes every movement of the traditional Mass except the Credo. Sometimes the omission of the Credo reflects the composer’s discomfort with the technical challenges of setting this long and doctrinally dense text (the “laundry-list aspect”). More often, though, composers are instructed to omit the Credo by the churches that commission their music. Even in those churches that cultivate a tradition of elaborate choral music, it is usually felt that the Nicene Creed should simply be spoken in unison by the congregation.
“There is something comforting in the knowledge that, if all other knowledge of the Council of Nicaea had been lost, its essential teachings could be reconstructed from any music library.”
Here we find a strange paradox. The Nicene Creed is by any measure one of the crucial statements of Christian faith, and despite its unlikely structure, the text has inspired a long tradition of musical setting. Some of this music is of immense distinction: in many famous pieces like Bach’s Mass in B minor, Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices, and Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, the Credo contains some of the musical highlights of the entire piece. But outside those few famous mountain peaks of the musical literature, these historic settings of the Credo are rarely heard, either in concert or in the churches that originally fostered this music. The Credo is sidelined by composers, who avoid setting it, and by performers, who often omit Credo movements even in recordings and concert performances of masses. And these settings of the Creed are difficult to use in worship for understandable reasons of practicality (the Credo of a Renaissance mass setting could easily take eight to ten minutes to sing). This leaves much of the music inspired by Nicaea sitting untouched on library shelves. As a church musician I have prepared editions of numerous medieval and Renaissance masses for liturgical use, including more than two hundred settings of the Credo; by my current count, the number of those Credos that I have ever sung or conducted in a liturgy is four.
For the foreseeable future, anyone who wishes to hear the full range of music inspired by the Nicene Creed will need to encounter it through recordings and score study. What a theologically informed listener might notice in such a project is how much the emphases of the musical Credo diverge from those of the historical Nicene Creed. Whereas the historian of doctrine focuses on the new conciliar definitions of the status of the Son and Holy Spirit, the composer is more usually drawn to the briefly sketched events of the life of Christ—the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection and ascension. Composers have often treated the Credo as though it were a short, illustrative résumé of the Gospels which happens to be surrounded by lumps of abstract doctrinal exposition. Sometimes one gets the impression, particularly in listening to masses from the eighteenth century, that composers are rushing through the opening lines of the Credo as perfunctorily as possible until they get to the part that describes the life of Christ. In Haydn’s Little Organ Mass, the music rushes headlong through the opening sections of text, changes to a reverential adagio for Et incarnatus est, and then races to the end of the Credo at top speed; the entire Credo is over in less than three minutes.
Haydn could get away with writing a three-minute Credo because he had access to techniques that are frowned upon today: he could save time by having different sections of the choir recite different lines of the Creed simultaneously. Telescoping the text in this way, a common practice in the eighteenth century, now strikes us as irreverent, perhaps even cynical, a mechanical way of rushing through the words of a long text at the expense of intelligibility. But I have always liked the collisions of different lines of text in these masses; it seems to me that this overlaying of adjacent lines of text is the logical extension of the subtler overlapping of voices that is always created by vocal polyphony. It sounds like a distant echo of the even more radical polytextuality of later medieval polyphony, where two or three distinct texts in different languages might be sung simultaneously.
One should not push too hard in looking for an edifying symbolic interpretation of the overlayered texts in many Credo settings; it is likely that many composers really were just trying to get through the text as quickly as possible, bowing to the wishes of aristocratic patrons who didn’t want to spend too much time in church. But it is true that the musical portrayal of unity in multiplicity is an important part of the tradition of the sung Credo, echoing the noisy diversity of the Church itself. Centuries of composers have arrived at the final words of the Credo (et vitam venturi saeculi, “and the life of the world to come”) and broken out into a fugue. In Beethoven’s massive Missa solemnis, the words Et vitam venturi saeculi, amen are spun out for about eight minutes of music, with the final words of the Credo tumbling over each other in increasingly complex and virtuosic counterpoint. These large-scale musical settings convey the cosmic significance of the Nicene Creed. They help to persuade us that belief in “the life of the world to come” is not one more article of faith, describing the prospect of one’s personal continuity after death, but the promise of human life being brought into union with the Triune God whose nature and acts have been described through the whole Credo. At its highest point of aspiration, this music attempts to portray nothing less than the great perichoretic dance of the Trinity itself.
“They help to persuade us that belief in “the life of the world to come” is not one more article of faith, describing the prospect of one’s personal continuity after death, but the promise of human life being brought into union with the Triune God whose nature and acts have been described through the whole Credo.”
This is one way of setting the Credo, massive and imposing, aspiring to portray the eternal realities described by Christian belief on the largest possible canvas. There are other ways, which portray the Creed on a smaller scale and as a more recognizable human utterance. Behind the whole musical tradition of polyphony for the Creed, at least in the Christian West, is the chant melody to which the Credo was originally sung, now known in Catholic chant books as “Credo I.” Probably a Latin adaptation of a Byzantine liturgical melody, Credo I was the standard melody for the Creed for centuries. But in fact Credo I is less a “melody” than a formula for recitation, with each phrase of the creed circling around G, descending to E and rising back to G again. It is simple enough to be picked up by an untrained congregation and flexible enough that its musical formulae can be reworked for any language. The entire melody spans only six notes.
Such was the historical authority of Credo I that it took centuries for any other chant melody for the Nicene Creed to take hold in the Western Church; almost every medieval melody for the Creed that has survived is an altered variant of Credo I. Only in the fifteenth and sixteenth century did other, more musically ambitious chant tunes for the Creed begin to take hold; the Credo Cardinalis and Credo de Angelis in the Latin Church, as well as vernacular Protestant settings of the Creed like John Merbecke’s in The Booke of Common Praier Noted. The tune was so well known that it was frequently alluded to in polyphonic settings of the Creed from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Even those musical settings of the Credo that bear no other relationship to Gregorian chant usually use the opening phrase Credo in unum Deum from Credo I as an intonation (sung liturgically by the priest, or in concert settings by a soloist). As late as the 1940s, when Stravinsky was putting the finishing touches on his Mass, he carefully inscribed the millennium-old opening melody of Credo I as the priest’s opening phrase.
The chanted Credo I, musically humble though it is, was heard and sung by more medieval and early modern churchgoers than would have ever heard a piece of polyphony. Its music varies little from one phrase of the Creed to the next; there is no special text painting to mark the mention of Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The main goal of this music is to articulate the syntax of the Credo as clearly as possible. This kind of purely syntactical setting of the Credo is rare in later music; one interesting example is in the mid-fifteenth-century Missa Sine Nomine for five voices by Jean de Ockeghem. In Ockeghem’s Credo, the tenor voice calmly and almost mechanically declaims the entire text of the Credo on the notes G and A, while the other voices pass in and out of the texture, creating interesting harmonies as they intersect with the tenor’s untiring recitation. The entire text of the Credo flows past with no change to the texture and character of the polyphony; there is a brief final flourish on the Amen and the music is over. Such aesthetic reserve is rare in modern music. To find a comparable contemporary example one would have to turn to a composer like Arvo Pärt who deliberately imitates medieval styles; the Credo from his Berliner Messe is a rare example of a modern piece where the grammatical projection of the text is pursued to the exclusion of any overt attempts at textual expression or variety of texture.
These Credos by Pärt and Ockeghem are unusual in their single-mindedness; even apart from the imperatives of modern emotional expression in music, most composers would feel the need for some textual variety when setting a text as long as the Credo. And the practicalities of liturgical ceremonial encouraged composers from an early date to divide the text in certain key places: medieval congregations were accustomed to kneel at the mention of Christ’s incarnation, and it became understood that the music accompanying this portion of the Creed should support that. (Sometime in the 1360s Guillaume de Machaut became the first known composer to set the complete text of the mass to polyphonic music; already in this early mass the words Ex Maria Virgine—“[he became incarnate] from the Virgin Mary”—are set in long slow chords as a signal to the congregation of this especially solemn moment.) By the time of Palestrina, the Et incarnatus was invariably set in slow solemn chords sung by the full choir.
In the hands of later generations of composers, the Et incarnatus came to mean something quite different. In the great orchestral masses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the announcement of the Incarnation is often taken away from the full choir and assigned to a soloist; these Et incarnatus solos become longer, more expressive and more florid, reaching an arguable culmination in the great soprano aria in Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C minor. Here the setting apart of the words Et incarnatus is not just a signal to the congregation to kneel, but an occasion for composers to display the most human and personal forms of expression. The musical style veers away from the standard language of church polyphony and moves closer, sometimes dangerously close, to the secular style of the operatic theatre. The increasing approximation to secular styles often caused discomfort to church authorities, and sometimes crossed boundaries of good taste, but there was a clear expressive rationale: at the moment of the Et incarnatus the Creed announces the full humanity of Christ, and composers sought to portray the incarnate God-Man as a figure with recognizably human features, one whom the members of the congregation could imagine bearing their own everyday griefs.
“…the loss of the tradition of the sung Credo is an unfortunate one; as a reflection on the state of the Church as a whole, it seems to signify a loss of faith in the power of the Church’s song, as though the multiplicity of meanings and emphasis that have come with a millennium of musical setting were merely a tiresome distortion of the meaning of Christian speech.”
Some composers took a deliberately idiosyncratic approach to the setting of the Creed. In his settings of the Mass, Franz Schubert deliberately omitted certain portions of the text that seem to have caused problems for him personally (the clause he most often left out was “I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church”). Such excisions were illicit at the time and have caused problems for many conductors since then: is there a way to restore the missing credal text without destroying Schubert’s music? But there are other ways that composers could leave a distinctive stamp on the text of the Credo while remaining within the boundaries of liturgical propriety. The Credo movements in Beethoven’s two masses are well known for the puzzling repetitions of their texts (et, et resurrexit. . . non, non erit finis), which create a strange stammering effect, as though the singers were too overcome with awe to recite the text of the Creed without pausing for breath. Even more interesting is the end of the Credo in Stravinsky’s Mass, where the choir suddenly sings sharply and loudly to emphasize a group of four-syllable words (Ecclesiam. . . peccatorum. . . mortuorum). The effect is jarring because the entirety of the Credo thus far had been quiet, chant-like, and hypnotic; the sudden change of emphasis is almost frightening, as though an orator who had been reading a text softly was now suddenly shouting at you. (Translated into English, Stravinsky’s text setting would read “I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic CHURCH, I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness OF SINS, and I look forward to the resurrection OF THE DEAD.”)
Stravinsky was notoriously eccentric in his setting of sung texts, and he may or may not have meant for this emphasis to have any special doctrinal significance. He may instead have been struck by the rhythmic heft of these three Latin words, and the way that they helped him create an inexorable sense of forward motion. What makes Stravinsky’s Credo so uniquely compelling is that, although the composer’s seriousness of purpose is clear, it is not easy to pin down exactly what he wished to express. The setting is immensely exciting and powerful but also profoundly impersonal; the composer himself described its character as “absolutely cold.” “I wished only to preserve the text in a special way,” Stravinsky would later explain. “One composes a march to facilitate marching men, so with my Credo I hope to provide an aid to the text.”
The premiere of Stravinsky’s Mass, which took place against the composer’s wishes in a concert hall rather than in a liturgical setting, is sadly typical in illustrating the modern fate of the choral Credo. With the exception of concert performances of large orchestral masses, this is a repertoire that has largely vanished from the musical repertoire. And there are good reasons for this; most modern churches prefer to assign the Creed to the entire congregation rather than having it sung by the choir alone. These pastoral concerns often result in the Creed being spoken rather than sung even in churches that have a highly ornate musical tradition elsewhere. None of this is surprising in itself. But the loss of the tradition of the sung Credo is an unfortunate one; as a reflection on the state of the Church as a whole, it seems to signify a loss of faith in the power of the Church’s song, as though the multiplicity of meanings and emphasis that have come with a millennium of musical setting were merely a tiresome distortion of the meaning of Christian speech. Perhaps one of the best ways to commemorate the anniversary of the Nicene Creed would be to find new opportunities to sing musical versions of the Credo in the Church’s liturgy, even if other musical parts of the service need to be curtailed as a result. The length of the sung Credo, after all, is simply a reflection of the number of articles in the Church’s statement of faith. There is much to believe.
Aaron James is the Director of Music for the Toronto Oratory of St Philip Neri. He has worked extensively as a writer and editor on musical subjects, most recently as the editor of the Parish Book of Motets series for the Church Music Association of America, with a second volume due to appear in early 2026. He is a contributing editor for The Lamp Magazine.
