Accents in singing vs. in speaking

Au contraire, mon frère; my experience is the opposite. I sing in the choir at my church (a cathedral). They do fairly well with Latin, and not too bad with German, but last year we sang the Cantique de Jean Racine (in French) and even after I wrote out the words in phonetic fashion and went over them several times, the way it came out would make a cow laugh (as far as the pronunciation is concerned -- the musical effect was divine.)