There is immense joy today in the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fidélité at Jouques and in the hearts of all of us who love with all our being the holy Father Benedict, patron of the Benedictine Order and author of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict. St. Benedict of Nursia lived from the end of the 5th century to the beginning of the 6th century. We know him mainly because of the hagiography of St. Gregory the Great in the form of dialogues. There, we discover how St. Benedict is a model for all people. In 1964, Pope Paul VI named St. Benedict the Patron Saint of Europe. Let us remember the numerous abbeys that the Benedictines, like a net, have woven throughout the European continent. To honor such an immense spiritual light for humanity, we at Neumz have chosen the sequence Laeta dies magni ducis.  

The sequence Læta dies first appeared in the 16th century in the missals printed in Montecassino and was probably the work of a Benedictine monk from this great Italian monastery, which was founded by St. Benedict himself. This sequence is a poetic formula in which St. Gregory the Great offers eulogies, here and there, in his biography of St. Benedict. This is what the Holy Father says in chapter 8 of his Dialogues: "What you tell me here is admirable and astonishing! For, in the water drawn from the rock, I see Moses; in the iron that rises from the depths, Elisha; in walking on the water, Peter; and, finally, in weeping over the death of an enemy, David. Deep down, I truly believe that this man was filled with the spirit of all of the righteous!" It is easy to recognize the source of our text. 

Our sequence is not limited to presenting the story of St. Benedict, but it is rooted in the history of salvation, with the great characters of the Old Testament. From the beginning, St. Benedict is evoked as a guide, who leads us through history to recognize in him the presence of the same Spirit who was present in Abraham, Elijah, Elisha, Joseph, and Jacob... It is a true journey of faith through which we discover in the great Patriarch St. Benedict, little by little, the figure of the great figures of the Old Testament. The verbs that refer to "discovering," "recognizing" and "realizing" are the constant and progressive call to deepen the gaze of faith and trust in the One who is always guiding his children to the eternal joys of Christ, as the great patriarchs guided the chosen people of God. 

The sequence, by its nature, belongs to the Liturgy of the Word and follows a path, both in the development of the text (a story) and in the melody. This is why the melody is repeated in every two stanzas (same melody in stanzas 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 7 and 8), and in the following always takes a step forward, both in the melody and in the development of the story it presents. 

The metrical scheme would be that of a tercet: composed in verses of minor art, the first two are octosyllabic and rhyme with each other and the third is heptasyllabic, whose rhyme associates it with the third of the following stanza. The included rhyme scheme would look like this: aab ccb dde ffe... 

The mode chosen for this sequence is mode VI, referred to as devotus by the ancients. Indeed, this is the mode of piety, a very simple mode. Therefore, it is full of the spirit of childhood, in our case, the best mode to express the most tender devotion of children toward their Father, St. Benedict. The semitone relationship of the notes La and Do with the B flat confers even greater strength to this tenderness, to this closeness of the Father to his children. 

The same melody is attributed to two stanzas, with the particularity that the third verse in all of the stanzas receives the same melody: a melodic turn that is characteristic of the piece, the degrees Do-B flat-La-Sol-Fa. Thus, the melody for the first two stanzas is a gradual ascent from Fa, the fundamental of mode VI, to La, the dominant, and then from La to Do, and from there descends with great devotion in the last verse from Do to Fa.

The melody for the third and fourth stanzas is somewhat the exception in this piece, as it begins on the Fa and develops briefly in the low register until it reaches the Do. It then gradually rises to the Fa, from Fa to La in the second verse to conclude with great devotion in the last verse, from Do to Fa, as we have already stated. 

The melody for the fifth and sixth stanzas is a variation of the melody of the first and second stanzas. In fact, the melodic movement of the first verse is slightly changed with a greater presence of the La, but the melody is identical in the second verse. 

Finally, the melody of the seventh and eighth stanzas moves from a slight variation of the previous melody to a burst of joy. Starting from B flat, the melody descends with great fervor to the Fa and then rises with great impulse to the high Re, settling on the Do to once again return to the high Re. From there, it begins a descent full of devout reverence that passes through the La, the Fa, and returns to the La before returning to sing the melody of the third verse that gives unity to the entire composition.