Parergon

Sequences and rhymed offices, the two great plainchant genres that reached their apogee in the late Middle Ages, remain underappreciated. They were consigned to [End Page 268] history by the Council of Trent. To be fair, though, having a ‘cultural encounter’ with the latter genre (also known as versified office or historia) is particularly challenging, for it unfolds across the full twenty-four-hour cycle of canonical hours. Far shorter, and as appealing as many a popular hymn, is the paired-versicle sequence that was sung at Mass following the Gradual. Their tunefulness is borne out by the few sequences that the Council permitted to remain in use, the best-known being Thomas of Celano’s Dies irae and Jacopone da Todi’s Stabat mater.

Yossi Maurey’s handsomely produced monograph is devoted to the sequences specially composed for two feast days that were of defining importance to Sainte-Chapelle, the exquisite royal chapel on Île-de-la-Cité, purpose-built to house Louis IX’s collection of relics. Most notable among the relics in its treasury were those associated with the Passion of Christ: the Crown of Thorns and pieces of the True Cross. Although the Feast of the Crown of Thorns (11 August) and the Feast of the Reception of Relics (30 September), celebrating its translation to Paris, were not unique to Sainte-Chapelle, only there were these feast days celebrated as annuale. And, accordingly, they were provided with elaborate liturgy befitting top-rank feast days with octave. It fell to liturgists to activate the full political potential of Sainte-Chapelle’s relics, ‘to weave them into a narrative that foregrounded and idealized France, Paris, the French king, and the Passion of Christ’ (p. 16). Whereas at neighbouring Notre Dame cathedral the liturgy in service of its Marian programme employed elaborate polyphonic music (florid organum and discant in up to four parts), at Sainte-Chapelle the locus of liturgical poetico-musical creativity was plainchant, syllabic settings of metrically rhymed poetry, crafted such that every word of text was clearly intelligible. The melodies themselves, however, were mostly borrowed. Maurey’s coverage of this characteristic, the predominance of contrafacta among the sequences under study, is of particular interest.

His study starts with a crisp introduction covering the historical and political significance of the relics; the interconnectedness of liturgy, architecture, and music at Sainte-Chapelle; manuscript affiliation and repertoire transmission; and the technique of contrafacture. He then proceeds to a detailed explication of the ten sequences apportioned to each of the two feast days (Parts 1 and 2). His presentation is a model of lucidity. With one’s visual imagination stirred by readily available illustrations of this famous sacral space, the reader who is prepared to sing will have everything at hand needed to appreciate the beauty of this music and the richness of its poetic imagery—textual exegesis, translations, music in modern notation, and comparative tables juxtaposing original and newly composed texts of the fifteen contrafacta. For reasons of space, one contrafactum by way of example must suffice: Verbum bonum et iocundum (the fifth sequence in the Crown of Thorns), which is set to the melody of Verbum bonum et suave (Marian sequence for the Annunciation and the Assumption). Maurey explains: ‘the Crown Verbum bonum hinges on a word associated not with the moment of Christ’s conception but with a moment associated with the final period of His life, [End Page 269] the Passion [not ‘Hail Mother’ but ‘Hail Crown’]. […] If Mary is the intercessor between the praying community and Christ, it is the Crown which serves that role in Verbum bonum et iocundum, mediating between Christ, the Franks, and the Kingdom of France along with its kings and queens’ (pp. 74–76). The Marian...