Let Thy Good Spirit

Composer(s) / Arranger(s): Eric Burger

Performance Time: 3:10  |  Grade: 1 1/2  |  Style: Contemporary, Classical

Pavel Grigorievich Chesnokov was born in Vladimir, near Moscow on 24 October 1877. At an early age, Chesnokov gained recognition as a great conductor and choirmaster. This reputation earned him a position on staff at the Moscow Conservatory where great composers and music scholars like Tchaikovsky shared their skills and musical insight. There he established the choral conducting program which he taught from 1920 until his death.

By the age of 30, Chesnokov had completed nearly four hundred sacred choral works, but his proliferation of sacred music came to a standstill due to religious suppression under the Russian Revolution. He subsequently composed nearly one-hundred secular works and conducted secular ensembles such as the Moscow Academy Choir and the Bolshoi Theatre Choir. When the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was destroyed in 1933 in order to construct the House of Soviets, Chesnokov – where he had been its last choirmaster – was so deeply disturbed that he stopped composing music altogether.

Let Thy Good Spirit is a choral work composed in 1912 as the last in his Ten Communion Hymns (opus 25). This cycle of hymns were the last of his sacred compositions, and he never heard them performed. While the Ten Communion Hymns are richly sonorous harmonized settings of traditional chant melodies; this present work does not use a pre-existing chant melody. The fifth work in this cycle is the well know “Salvation is Created.”