The text of this piece is taken from Psalm 12, verse 6. After the opening verses, where a feeling of sorrow for the absence of God is expressed – an immense desire, a thirst for God, for fullness, a cry of hope – in the last verse of this short psalm, the psalmist ends in jubilation and thanksgiving. The message of this Introit is thus very rich as each of the three musical phrases corresponds to a truly essential attitude of the soul: trust in mercy, joy in salvation, and singing from a heart overflowing with gratitude for the blessings and spiritual gifts received. Hope, joy, song: these three attitudes are intimately linked and flow from one another. First and foremost is the experience of mercy, the fact of being saved by love. The certainty of this love engenders trust, even through the trials of this life that leads to eternity. Deep joy then blossoms in all circumstances, good or bad, of an existence inhabited by grace. And where there is joy, there is also song; music amplifies this joy and the love that is the source of it all. Let us see how melody sublimates what we have just underlined.

For a song of trust and joy, mode 5 is ideal, although it is not a dazzling Introit, but rather a piece of great recollection; meditative, joy contained in the heart of the singer: only on two occasions in in salutari and qui bona is it quite expressive, when it goes beyond the dominant of the mode, the C. 

The intonation is very intimate; the vocative Domine is wrapped in great tenderness. It starts from the F and returns to it through the G and after reaching the A, forming a small, gentle curve, a third in range. Then, at in, the soul leans into the low D, the most serious passage of the whole piece, from the depths of being, and launches a confident cry for divine mercy. Note the impetus that carries the melody in the second syllable of misericordia to the pneumatic cut in which it masterfully prepares the dominant, the C, the only occasion on which it appears in this first phrase, preparing in turn in this secondary accent the main accent of the word before closing the word with a cadential formula that is repeated up to three times in the piece. All this highlights the essential word of the phrase: the love that forgives and brings us hope. Speaking of hope, the soul sings the verb speravi which closes this first phrase with vigour: it is also notable for a melodic ascent that touches B flat, and develops in a great climate of confidence strengthened by the chiasmatic movement. Speravi ends as misericordia, same formula; the two important words of this first phrase are thus answered in a very expressive way.

The second phrase begins with a restrained joy that expands in the soul: from the F we move briskly to the A with the salicus of the accent of exsultavit but without going beyond the A, until we reach the centre of it all: my heart, cor meum. There, the C resounds again, as if in misericordia, with firmness, with brilliance, reinforcing that joy with the tristropha of the possessive, meum. And from joy we move on to a burst of jubilation in salutari with two identical torculi in the secondary and principal accents that reach the high E: the soul exults in knowing it is saved. But it is not just any salvation, but your salvation, Lord, salutari tuo. Again, the possessive adjective is sung as an extension of this jubilation: we remain in the treble range, around the dominant; note the pneumatic cut in the A that prepares the C, and the chiasmatic movement in the last syllable that further reinforces the presence and strength of the C in this second phrase.

At the beginning of the third phrase there is a return without transition to the low register, to the initial atmosphere of the piece. The verb cantabo and the name of the Lord, Domino, are treated with great sobriety and gravity, without going beyond the A, we return to the intimacy, the inner song of the soul that we found at the beginning of the piece. It is the song of thanksgiving, of the intimate prayer that emanates from the depths of the soul filled by God. This beginning of the third phrase has something of that of the first and second phrases: not exceeding the scope of the third, F-A, the movement of the salicus F-G-A and a brief melodic development on the postonic syllable of Domino.

After this, at qui bona, the soul sings again with overflowing joy all that it receives from its Lord, all those spiritual gifts he bestows on it: we return to the high register, going even beyond C; the soul sings with great complacency and warmth, the accent of bona as well as the beautiful and broad melodic descent leading to the simple cadenza in the B flat appears again, musically and semantically joining bona-tribuit with speravi: our hope is that the Lord will grant us those gifts. The piece ends very peacefully, following the same melodic formula already found twice in misericordia and speravi, in the first phrase, giving the whole piece a profound unity and a graceful interiority.