Dies Irae: the chant in Tonic Solfa
Dies Irae, the chant, in Tonic Solfa (doh is F): the solfa line by line, staff notation and a piano to sing along with.
Download the solfa (PDF)A4, free to print and share with your choir
- Key
- D minor
- Doh
- F
- Time
- 8/4
- Starts on
- d (F)
- Range
- m, to r (A to G, a seventh)
- Music
- Gregorian Chant
- Also called
- Day of Wrath, Dies irae, dies illa
Tune Dies Irae (Gregorian Chant). Sources and licences.
The solfa
| d-t,-d-l,-t,-s,-l,-l,- |
| d-drdt,l,s,t,-d-t,-l,- |
| m,-s,l,l,-l,s,t,-d-t,-l,- |
The solfa line by line
The same solfa as plain text, easy to copy into your own notes or a message to the choir. To print it, download the solfa as a PDF.
Doh is F · 8/4
Staff notation
The melody on the treble staff in D minor.
The staff is drawn here when you scroll to it.
About the tune
Dies irae, “Day of wrath”, is the medieval Latin poem of the Last Judgement that was sung at the Requiem Mass, the Mass for the dead, for centuries. Its plainchant tune has become the sound of doom itself: Berlioz quoted it in the witches' sabbath of his Symphonie fantastique, Saint-Saëns in Danse Macabre, Rachmaninoff again and again, and film scores still borrow its first four notes whenever something terrible is coming.
This is its first verse, “Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sibylla”, read from the Vatican edition of the Graduale (Rome, 1908) and checked against the Liber Usualis of 1904. Chant has no beat and no bar lines: here every syllable takes one beat, so where two notes are sung to one syllable they share it, and each line of the poem is one bar.
- Melody, the sequence of the Requiem Mass: Gregorian Chant
New to solfa? Read how to read Tonic Solfa and how to find the doh of a song.
Questions about Dies Irae
What is the doh of Dies Irae?
In this version, in D minor, doh is F. If your choir sings it in another key, doh moves to the new key note and every solfa syllable stays the same — that is what movable doh means.
What note does Dies Irae start on?
It starts on d (F in D minor). Find doh first, then sing up or down to d.
Is Dies Irae in the public domain?
Yes. the tune was first published in 1908. Everyone named died before 1955 and it was published before 1929, so the tune is out of copyright in the UK, the EU, the United States and Nigeria. Modern arrangements of it can still be under copyright.