Good afternoon, and welcome to Chamber Singers of Iowa City’s final concert of the season, Into Full Flame. We begin with Mozart’s Veni Sancte Spiritus, a brief, bright setting of a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to “fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.” This image gives the program its starting point — Mozart begins with a prayer for love to be kindled. Pēteris Vasks then asks for peace with music that unfolds patiently, repeating the words “dona nobis pacem” until the phrase becomes entirely supplicative. Vaughan Williams takes that same plea into something much more tangible, placing it beside poetry, scripture, political speech, and the memory of war.

Mozart wrote Veni Sancte Spiritus in Vienna in 1768, when he was twelve years old. The piece is impressive for that reason alone, but it is more aptly framed as practical church music by a young composer learning how liturgy and music interact. The scoring is festive: SATB soloists, SATB choir, oboes, horns, trumpets, timpani, strings, continuo, and organ. The work has two parts: a bright Allegro setting of the Latin prayer, followed by a quick Alleluia. The music has the clarity and balance we expect from Mozart, but it is also highly influenced by the Salzburg church style around him, especially in its exchanges between soloists and choir, brief imitative passages, and use of brass and timpani.

Mozart’s text is easy to confuse with the longer Pentecost sequence that begins with the same words. Here, though, he sets a much shorter prayer: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. You have gathered the nations together in the unity of faith.” The prayer is not only about private devotion — it imagines separated people being gathered into one community.

Pēteris Vasks’s Dona nobis pacem enters with a very different kind of energy. Mozart’s music moves quickly and radiates outward. Vasks’s music, on the other hand, takes its time. Written in 1996–1997 and commissioned by the Latvian Radio Choir, the work uses only one phrase: Dona nobis pacem, “Grant us peace.” It is scored for SATB choir and string orchestra, with the strings and choir working as equal partners.

Vasks takes a unique approach to setting this well-known text. The work is not built around dramatic contrast or any poignant rhetoric. Instead, he continually repeats the phrase “dona nobis pacem” in the choir and lets the music morph and shift around it, so that the audience begins to notice the smallest adjustments: a new voice entering, a change in harmony, a gradual rise in intensity, or a cadence that releases a long stretch of tension. With only three words, it is these musical differences that become the substance of the piece.

Vasks’s music often carries a moral and spiritual weight. Born in Latvia in 1946, he grew up under Soviet rule and was the son of a Baptist pastor. His early music drew more heavily on modernist techniques, while many of his later works turn toward direct expression, spiritual searching, and the conflict between violence and hope. Dona nobis pacem belongs to that later world. Vasks gives one phrase of text enough time for the listener to hear how difficult it is to ask for peace.

Vaughan Williams then places the same request inside a much more concrete historical framing, where peace is no longer an idea in the abstract. It becomes a matter of bodies, families, soldiers, governments, and nations.

Vaughan Williams composed Dona Nobis Pacem in 1935–1936 for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society. Vaughan Williams himself had served in the First World War, first in the Royal Army Medical Corps and later in the Royal Artillery. By the mid-1930s, Europe was again moving toward war. In this context, “grant us peace” could no longer be a general religious sentiment. It carried the memory of one war and the warning of another.

The text of Dona Nobis Pacem brings several sources together. Vaughan Williams uses the Latin Mass text, poems by Walt Whitman, a speech by the British parliamentarian John Bright opposing the Crimean War, passages from the Hebrew Bible, and the angelic song from Luke: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Whitman’s Civil War poems sit at the center of the piece. “Beat! Beat! Drums!” interrupts daily life with the sound of war. “Reconciliation” imagines tenderness toward a dead enemy. “Dirge for Two Veterans” mourns a father and son carried together to burial.

Vaughan Williams chose these texts carefully. Peace, in this work, is not only a church word. It belongs to soldiers, civilians, grieving families, political leaders, and nations deciding what they are willing to do to one another. Again and again, the soprano returns with “dona nobis pacem,” sometimes above the full ensemble and sometimes more exposed. The baritone often carries the role of witness, especially when John Bright’s speech introduces the “Angel of Death” moving through the land. The chorus changes roles throughout the cantata: congregation, crowd, army, mourner, and finally a community asking for peace.

The ending of the work is hopeful, but not easy. Vaughan Williams brings in biblical promises of peace: nations will not lift up swords against nations; mercy and truth will meet; peace will be given. But the final return of “dona nobis pacem” is quiet. The soprano has the final say in the work, singing the mediant pitch of the tonal center, giving some question to its finality. In this way, the work does not end with certainty — rather, it ends with a prayer that has survived everything the piece has placed before it.

This afternoon, Mozart gives us the first spark: a prayer that love might be kindled and people gathered together. Vasks stays with the simplest version of that prayer and gives it time to deepen. Vaughan Williams then asks what that prayer means in a world that knows exactly what war costs. By the end, peace is not presented as easy, sentimental, or guaranteed. It is something people have to ask for, work toward, and keep asking for.