(Lat.: ‘darkness’).
A name commonly applied to the combined Offices of Matins and Lauds on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of Holy Week. The service is marked by the extinction of 15 candles, one after each psalm. At the end of the canticle Benedictus Dominus all the candles are extinguished and what follows is said or sung ‘in tenebris’. The musically significant parts of the service are the first three of the nine lessons of Matins, taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the responsories that follow each lesson. The plainchant of the Lamentations is an elaborated psalm tone, and there is a continuous history of polyphonic settings from the 15th century to the early 19th (sometimes under different titles, as in Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres or, in a later, non-liturgical context, Stravinsky’s Threni; see Lamentations). The responsories were set with particular frequency after the Council of Trent (1545–63; see Responsory, §5). Other texts from Tenebrae set polyphonically include the Benedictus (ii) and the Miserere from Lauds. These two items, alone of the four psalms and two canticles of Lauds, are unchanged on each of the three days, which is no doubt why they alone were set. Composers of Tenebrae music (apart from the Lamentations) include G.M. Asola, Gesualdo, Jacob Handl, Lassus, Morales, Pomponio Nenna, Palestrina and Victoria. Although the Lamentations remained popular as a Baroque form, the setting of other Holy Week texts appears to have been largely confined to the Counter-Reformation.
JOHN CALDWELL