Ca pe Imparatul, "As We Bear the King," is Gavriil Musicescu's choral setting of the Cherubic Hymn, the text sung during the Great Entrance of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, and remains among the most widely sung of his liturgical compositions in Romanian Orthodox parishes today. Musicescu wrote it during his long tenure directing the Iasi Metropolitan Cathedral choir, which he took over in 1876 and reformed by introducing female voices for the first time in a Romanian church choir, alongside his professorship at the Iasi Conservatory from 1872 until his death in 1903, where he became director in his final two years. His choral idiom blended the harmonic language he had absorbed studying in Saint Petersburg with the melodic contours of Romanian psaltic, or Byzantine derived, chant.
Facts
Subject Matter
Religious Subject MatterSourced to the subject's own accountThe Cherubic Hymn text itself long predates Musicescu, introduced into the Byzantine Divine Liturgy under Emperor Justin II in 574 to accompany the transfer of the eucharistic gifts to the altar, so a Musicescu setting places a nineteenth century Romanian composer's own choral voice inside a chant tradition already thirteen centuries old at the time he wrote it. The hymn traditionally falls into two contrasting musical sections, a slow, contemplative opening and a more majestic, glorifying close, a contrast Romanian choral settings including Musicescu's continue to observe. 1 Documented Liturgical UseSourced to the subject's own accountSung during the Great Entrance of the Divine Liturgy, when the bread and wine are carried in procession to the altar. 1 Scholarly ReceptionSourced to the subject's own accountMusicologists studying Romanian Orthodox choral music treat Musicescu as the central founding figure of a specifically Romanian choral idiom, distinct from both the Russian choral style he admired and the older unharmonized psaltic chant it grew out of, and his Cherubic Hymn settings remain standard repertoire cited in surveys of the genre within Romanian church music. 1 Production
Primary Artist / ComposerSourced to the subject's own account Place of OriginSourced to the subject's own accountNo source found gives an exact composition year for this setting; it dates from within Musicescu's 1876 to 1903 tenure directing the Iasi Metropolitan Cathedral choir, and no more precise date is asserted. FormatSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
Bringing Women's Voices Into an Iasi Cathedral Choir
Gavriil Musicescu spent nearly the whole of his working life in Iasi, teaching at its Conservatory from 1872 until his death in 1903, becoming the Conservatory's director in his final two years, and directing the choir of the city's Metropolitan Cathedral from 1876 onward. That cathedral appointment is where Ca pe Imparatul, his setting of the Cherubic Hymn sung at the Great Entrance of the Divine Liturgy, took shape, one of the compositions he wrote for the choir he was actively reforming at the time. The reform itself was not a small administrative change, Musicescu introduced female voices into the choir, the first time this had been done in a Romanian church choir, a decision that reshaped what a Romanian Orthodox cathedral choir could sound like going forward.
His compositional voice grew out of a genuine double education. Musicescu studied in Saint Petersburg before settling in Iasi, absorbing the Russian choral harmonic language that was then the dominant model for Orthodox Slavic church music, but he did not simply transplant it. His settings, this Cherubic Hymn among them, fold that Russian influenced harmony around the older melodic contours of Romanian psaltic chant, the Byzantine derived chanting tradition Romanian Orthodox worship had carried for centuries before any Western harmonic vocabulary reached it, producing a choral sound that is neither purely Russian nor purely Byzantine but distinctly his own version of Romanian church music.
A Hymn That Predates the Composer by Thirteen Centuries
When Gavriil Musicescu sat down to compose his own setting of the Cherubic Hymn, he was not writing new liturgical poetry, he was adding one more voice to a text that had already been sung in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy for roughly thirteen centuries before he touched it. The hymn entered the liturgy under Emperor Justin II in the year 574, introduced specifically to accompany the Great Entrance, the solemn procession that carries the bread and wine to the altar before consecration, and it has structured that moment of the service in the same basic way ever since across every Byzantine rite church, Romanian Orthodox worship among them.
The text carries a built in musical logic that every serious setting, Musicescu's included, has to honor. It falls into two contrasting sections, a slow and contemplative opening evoking the choir standing in mystically for the cherubim themselves, followed by a more majestic, glorifying close as the procession reaches its culmination, a deliberate contrast between quiet and grandeur that composers across the centuries have used as the hymn's essential dramatic shape. Musicescu's version, still heard in Romanian Orthodox parishes today, is one instance of a much older continuous practice rather than an isolated nineteenth century composition, a fact that is easy to lose sight of precisely because his setting is the one most Romanian congregations actually know.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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