1966
Supraphon SUA 10759
St. Nicholas Church, Malá Strana, Prague
1966
Supraphon SUA 10759
St. Nicholas Church, Malá Strana, Prague
A
1 - Introitus Rorate caeli [5:57]
Interpolations of Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei
Versicle Gloria Patri
2 - Kyrie [12:23]
Interpolations
B
1 - Prosa [14:46]
Sequence Mittit ad Virginem
2 - Patrem Omnipotentem (Credo) [4:07]
Prague Madrigal Singers
Miroslav Venhoda
Folk Singers in the St. Nicholas Church
Jaroslav Vodrážka • organ
Rorate
Czech Traditional Advent Chants of the
16th Century
Christmas, the supreme
celebration of the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, with its joyful
customs, songs and plays, has its preparatory period in Advent. Advent
means "the coming" and in the liturgical calendar reaches from the
fourth Sunday before Christmas to the first vespers of Christmas.
Believing Christians of all times looked, and still look, forward to
this "coming" with the greatest expectancy.
Many things contribute to the mysterious character of those four weeks.
They fall in the darkest season of the year, the time of longest nights
and shortest days. The divine service omits the Gloria
part of the mass. Purple is the liturgical colour of this "closed
period", a colour otherwise used only during periods of fasting or of
the feast of the Holy Innocents. The prevailing atmosphere is one of
penitence coupled with joyful expectation. The new liturgical year
begins with Advent. The lessons read during Advent are chosen to kindle
in the hearts of men a longing for the coming of the Saviour and, also,
to emphasize the need "to prepare the way of the Lord". Man is called
to watchfulness and also to joy at the coming of Christ.
Many customs and superstitious practices are associated with Advent:
noisy processions, for example, during the night aim at frightening
away evil spirits. In many protestant households advent wreaths, made
of pine twigs and decorated with four candles – one for each of the
four Sundays of Advent are hung, while in many catholic regions a
statue of the Holy Virgin is carried in procession from house to house.
The feast of two legendary saints fall during the advent period:
December 6 is the feast of St. Nicholas of Myra,
essentially a children's holiday, on which they get gifts of candy and
fruit in commemoration of the legend that St. Nicholas had once thrown
a purse of gold into the room of three poor girls as their dowry, in
order to spare their father, the painful necessity of selling them as
maid-servants. The legendary bishop, accompanied by an angel and a
devil (in other countries by his knave Ruprecht or Krampus) visits
children on the eve of his feast to give them presents and also to
admonish them. This custom, which seems to have originated in the
Middle Ages in the monastery schools of Northern France, later
degenerated into noisy masquerades. December 13 is the feast
of St. Lucy, the patroness of sufferers from eye-diseases –
and also the patroness of Dante Alighieri – whose feast is still
observed today, especially in Sweden by children wearing crowns with
lighted candles. St. Lucy's Day is also the day on which the weather is
reputed to settle down.
Early morning divine service – the so-called votive mass
– is the noblest and the most appropriate part of the celebrations of
Advent. These masses are sung before daybreak when the earth is still
shrouded in darkness as is most appropriate for a service at a time
dedicated to the longing of the old world for the coming of Christ. "Rorate"
is the Latin word uttered on the fourth Sunday of Advent at the
beginning of the introit and after the recitation of the following
verses from the prophet Isaiah (46,8): "Drop down, ye heavens, from
above, and let the skies pour down righteousness; let the earth open,
and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up
together: I, the Lord have created it". "Rorate" is the name given to
all the votive masses of Advent, sung in honour of the Holy Virgin, and
"rorate-song" is the name given to the hymns sung during Advent.
The Czech advent chants recorded here come from the library of the Strahov
Monastery in Prague; the manuscripts were discovered and
edited by Miroslav Venhoda and are performed by his Prague Madrigal
Singers. They sing of the word of the prophet who announced the coming
of the Messiah; of the joy which fills all just men at the coming of
the Lord; of the light to which we shall be lifted from the darkness;
of the glory of the approaching Saviour; of the grace and mercy of God;
of the dignity of the Trinity; of the annunciation and immaculate
conception of the Holy Virgin and of salvation to come. May their
simple words, their plain melodies and their joyful message find a
welcome and a response in the restless hearts of modern men.
Otto František Babler
The term RORATE is derived
from a mass which was, and is still, said according to the Roman
liturgy on the last Sunday before Christmas, and which can also be said
on any of the four previous Saturdays. It used to be extremely popular
in Bohemia – so much so that is was sometimes said every day for the
whole of Advent (i.e. the whole month before Christmas); in the
villages this used to be a great event, particularly in its
anticipation of the Christmas and New Year celebrations. The bells
would peal out to call the people together in the early hours of the
morning (usually at five o'clock, although in a few places even at
four); in the evening also, in some places, they used to "ring for
rest" – a signal for people to finish their work, close the tap-rooms
and retire to bed in preparation for the morning's mass. The fact that
most people, through the centuries, did not feel this a restriction was
largely a result of the natural predilection for communal singing to be
found in Bohemia, of which the Rorates are a specially noteworthy
expression. The other reason for their great popularity came from their
position in the middle of winter – and the special atmosphere of rising
in the very early morning and walking, often from one village to
another, with candles and lanterns, through the frosty night. The
Rorates (in their narrower sense) express an outburst of singing,
lights and joy in fellowship. As regards their music, they became one
of the main occasions for all classes of society to join together in
active artistic enjoyment, thanks to their variety, their cheerfulness
and their easy accessibility; a similar occasion (though in this case
more restricted) was at the rehearsals of the figural masses, which
used to take place in the early evening. It is no surprise, therefore
that, in the 18th century, the English traveler Charles Burney
was astounded by the wealth of musical activity he found in Bohemia, by
the extent of their repertoire and by the high standards achieved even
in the smallest villages.
The Bohemian Rorate was, in essence, an adaptation
(with interpolations) of Gregorian chant, raised to the level of a
surprisingly high art-form. The sung Introit, Kyrie,
Graduale, Alleluia, Prosa (Sequence) and Credo, as early as
the 15th century (1) were all translated into the vernacular or
transformed into paraphrases, (2) had their authentic tunes adapted to
their new language and (3) lost their original form, and were split
into their individual component parts, within each of which was set a
song of native origin. For example: the choral Kyrie
in its original form is composed of nine sections; Kyrie eleison
(repeated three times), Christe eleison (repeated three times), Kyrie
eleison (repeated three times). This becomes: paraphrase of the first
verse of the Kyrie, a strophic song, paraphrase of the second verse of
the Kyrie, strophic song, etc. It is clear that this Czech form had to
become many times larger than its original material, if it were not to
remain a mere random assortment of various pieces thrown together.
The songs which are interpolated in the Rorates are in many cases very
old examples – even from as early as the 14th century. (This type of
song is represented on Supraphon No. 20141 and in the Artia publication
"Latin songs of the Gothic and Renaissance periods in Bohemia").
These songs were originally Latin, and their roots must be sought in
the interpolations of the two verses with which every Latin service
ended – Benedicamus Domino and Deo Gratias.
Gradually more and more elements of local musical colour appeared: the
15th century saw the first translations into the vernacular and even
new songs composed in Czech – an innovation which was to progress
rapidly. While there is the remark "Ad missam Rorate" referring to one
of the songs in the Vyšší Brod Manuscript, called "Ave hierarchia"
(1410), the Vyšehrad Collection from the 1450's supplies a whole list
of songs available for this purpose – songs which form the largest part
of many MSS from the early years of the 16th century (The Franus
Cancional – from 1505, the Gradual in the Prague Museum Library XIII A
2, and the MSS deposited in Prague University Library, VI C 20a and VI
B 24). From the middle of the 16th century onwards so many of them
appeared (including the newly composed secular and sacred songs) that a
new type of Czech songbook emerged, called, aptly, "rorátník".
In them, the choice of songs was not left to the singer's discretion,
but suitable combinations were given for individual days. There were,
of course, very many editions, but to listen them in full would be
beyond the scope of this note.
In the space of time allowed by a single LP we can, of course, only
touch on a mere fragment of this wealth of material; indeed, not even
one day's material is fully included! One of the MS sources for this
type of Rorate is a book of very small format, written between 1588 and
1595 by Jan Táborský, and now in the Memorial of
National Literature in Strahov (Sig. D F IV 3). It represents the type
that was to become most popular in Bohemia, and was very soon published
by Matěj Pardubský in 1617. It ran to many copies and was republished
in Hradec Králové in 1823, by Jan František Pospíšil; the differences
between this edition and the previous one are negligible, and only
occur where words had acquired a slightly different meaning in two
hundred years, or where the response to certain melodic elements had
changed too sharply (I myself have performed many Rorates from this
very book in St. Vitus Cathedral, where I went to study in 1934). For
practical reasons (and mostly because of sheer length – the section
from Introit to Credo alone takes as long as two complete Masses!) only
shortened editions are in use nowadays, in particular that made by Dr.
Dobroslav Orel in Český kancionál (1921), an
excellent, scholarly work. This edition practically displaced the
earlier, longer form, which, after World War II, fell into oblivion.
One further point: at the end of the 14th century, there were in Prague
– according to accurate records which have been preserved – about 1,200
liturgical singers (compare this with the deplorable conditions
obtaining at Leipzig in Bach's time). The Hussite Movement had held out
for the active participation of the layman in the liturgy, and had
raised the importance of congregational singing to a level unheard of
in Europe at that time. The Utraquists (the Czech Catholics who took
mass in both ways) anticipated the liturgical reforms put forward by
the Second Vatican Council in the 16th century; the Gregorian chant was
ingeniously transformed to keep it in touch with the people, and thus
the thousand singers which Prague could boast at the time of Charles IV
were increased tenfold by the incorporation of all
church members. The most popular of the songs were already, in the 16th
century, being recast into new polyphonic forms and interpolated
between Rorates. This procedure is displayed on Supraphon No. 19564
(Stereo St 50564), "The Oldest Bohemian Polyphony" (Part II).
As mentioned earlier, different songs were set for each day of the
week. This record presents Sunday Rorates, not for any extra or
remarkable features, but merely because they happen to come first in
the MSS. More difficult, however, was the question of how the complete
work could best be abridged and still give a correct impression of the
original. In the end, the following sections were omitted:
1) The initial song "Ejhle, Hospodin přijde" (Lo, the Lord will come),
which is still immensely popular, and represents, to most people's
minds, the idea of Rorate as a Mass said in Advent before dawn. This
song follows the Antiphon "Ecce Dominus veniet", which is recorded in
the writings of Arnošt z Pardubic (1364), although the 16th century MS
which we have taken as the basis of this selection does not include it.
2) The introductory Antiphon and Oratio, which are almost identical
with the great Antiphons of the Roman Antiphonary, sung during the week
before Christmas.
The following sections were recorded (either
complete or abridged):
1) The Introit "Rorate caeli" together with the
Interpolations of the Psalm verse "Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei" and the
Versicle "Gloria Patri".
2) The Kyrie, with its Interpolations – the first
two three-part verses. (The following Graduale was omitted both because
of its length and because it follows very closely the style of
Gregorian chant, of which the Introit is sufficient example. The
Alleluia also, although not recorded here, is at least included in the
illustrations to this note).
3) The Prose (the Abelard Sequence "Mittit ad
Virginem") is also quoted in the index of the works of Arnošt z
Pardubic – it is included here in an abridged form.
4) The "Patrem Omnipotentem" (Credo) has also been
shortened for this record.
Most of the Rorate books end with the Credo, and only a few MSS include
other sections of the mass. The hooks containing the Rorates were
obviously intended for use as certain specific Propers; the usual
Ordinary of the mass would be conducted from the normal books in use
during the whole year.
One last point of interest; some of the Literary Brotherhoods demanded
that the Patrem Omnipotentem should be sung in two
voice parts on Sundays; although this tradition seems to have been very
strong then, I can find no evidence of it having been preserved to the
present day. The 1823 edition, however, seems to hint at this lost
improvisatory form.
This record is therefore an attempt to reconstruct this forgotten style
of canonic imitation.
Miroslav Venhoda