Pie Jesu (original Latin: Pie Iesu) is a text from the final couplet of the Dies irae and often included in musical settings of the Requiem Mass as a motet.
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Popular settings
The settings of the Requiem Mass by Luigi Cherubini, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Duruflé, John Rutter, Karl Jenkins, Kim André Arnesen and Fredrik Sixten include a Pie Jesu as an independent movement. Of all these, by far the best known is the Pie Jesu from Fauré's Requiem. Camille Saint-Saëns said of Fauré's Pie Jesu that "[J]ust as Mozart's is the only Ave verum corpus, this is the only Pie Jesu".
Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting of Pie Jesu in his Requiem (1985) has also become well known. It has been recorded by Sarah Brightman, Jackie Evancho, Sissel Kyrkjebø, Marie Osmond, Anna Netrebko, and others. Performed by Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston, it was a certified Silver hit in the UK in 1985.
Text
The original text, derived from the Dies irae sequence, is as follows:
Pie is the vocative of the word pius ("pious", "dutiful to one's parent or God"). "Jesu" (Iesu in Latin) is the vocative of Jesus/Iesus. Requiem is the accusative of requies ("rest"), sometimes mistranslated as "peace", although that would be pacem, as in Dona nobis pacem ("Give us peace").
Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem
Andrew Lloyd Webber, in his Requiem, combined the text of the Pie Jesu with that of the version of the Agnus Dei formerly appointed to be used at Requiem Masses: