Last updated: 17/12/05 Review: L'année liturgique en chant grégorien
Gregorian chant has undergone something of a revival in Western Europe in recent years. Walk into any record shop and you'll likely find a selection of chant compilations, most probably sandwiched between CDs with cover pictures of sunsets on mountains, and titles like Pan-pipe moods. The reasons for this resurgence in interest have been widely discussed: put briefly, in the cold, analytic climate that our so-called enlightened intellectuals and scientists have thrust upon us, the fact remains that God made us, and to quote St. Augustine, 'our hearts are restless until they rest in him'. Consequently, if society excludes the spiritual, then people can't help but look for it wherever they can find it. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people tend to go to the opposite extreme: very many reject entirely rational inquiry, and turn instead to New Age or neo-pagan movements, which are by-and-large overly sentimental, morally degenerate, and intellectually ridiculous. So be it: but somehow Gregorian chant also gets caught up in this whirlpool of 'spirituality'. One presumes this is because chant is perceived as esoteric, and reflects values polar to those of our society, infected now to the core by Jewish commercialism; or perhaps chant is acceptable because it is also employed by the false religions of the East that are so fashionable today.
We understand, then, why people are listening to chant again. However, a far more vexing question presents itself. The pan-pipe songs are vapid, hollow, and transitory, whereas Gregorian chant has raised christians' hearts to God for more than a thousand years. Monks have given up the world and led lives of penance, and the daily chants have sustained them for a lifetime. If chant has anything, it's depth. Of course, the recordings on Twenty favourite chants are unlikely to be the finest ever made, but nonetheless they consist of some of the most elevated expressions of the human spirit ever put to paper. Why, then, are our churches not full of New Agers, led through Gregorian chant to christian truth? One obvious answer is that it is for much the same reason that alcoholics rarely appreciate fine wines: after spending a life intoxicated by error, it becomes hard to distinguish the simple beauty of the truth. A deeper reason is that chant, and liturgical prayer more generally, simply doesn't 'work' as a one-off: it operates by repetition, and familiarity is its watchword. Not a pointless, wearying repetition: it is more like a spiritual equivalent of breathing, which we never get bored of, and which always draws precious air into our bodies. The Vexilla Regis or the Dies Iræ might be the crown jewels, but if they aren't set in the crown itself, then they just fall to the ground.
The epic work reviewed here is that crown: the whole year round in Gregorian chant, from Advent to the 24th Sunday after Pentecost. I'm afraid that very few Western pagans will have the patience to let it lead them gently to the ark of salvation, but for those already attached to the Church and her liturgy, it will surely provide great spiritual help and consolation. The declared primary audience is amateur scholas who sing the propers each week. This is borne out by the astronomical price of the whole collection: presumably the idea is that the schola buy a copy between them and share it amongst themselves. However, the Année liturgique should also have a much wider appeal. In the aftermath of the ill-fated second Vatican council, in much of Christendom it is now extremely difficult to be able to assist at the Roman Rite at all on Sundays, let alone get to a sung Mass. For those who wouldn't otherwise have access to the precious repository of chant that guided our fathers and their fathers before them to heaven, these CDs can provide the means to follow the Church's year from one's own sitting-room.
Let's suppose, then, that you've cashed in your gold reserves (or, like me, asked Father Christmas very nicely), and in return fourteen CDs, with some four hundred tracks, have dropped onto your doormat. Where do you start? Such a quantity of riches might seem overwhelming. My personal suggestion would be Easter Sunday, perhaps the warmest Mass of the whole year: it's like the calm after the storm. Remember that two days before, Jerusalem was desolate: the altars stripped bare, all the images veiled, the tabernacle empty, and the dark, thunderous tenebrae of Good Friday ended with confusion and strepitus. On Saturday came the high drama of the Paschal vigil, thrilling and triumphant. And now we find ourselves in the quiet of Easter morning. The excitement over, we are left with an overwhelming, serene, unshakeable joy: Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum. This sublime introit is shot through with allelujas, but no longer do they have the urgency they had in the vigil: rather, there is a calm confidence in the Lord who has conquered death.
Perhaps then one could turn to another of the greatest feasts of the year, Pentecost, a feast that might have passed by almost unnoticed to those brought up after the iconoclasm of the 1960s, which emasculated it almost completely. On the face of it, the introit is similar in structure to that of Easter Sunday, but as soon as we start to listen to it, we begin to see how versatile the chant is in reflecting different moods. Here we are resting securely no longer: now is the time for action, and the fiery coming of the Holy Ghost stirs us up—his enemies shall be routed!
In fact, the chants of the year express the full gamut of human emotion, just because the psalms themselves do. For an example of something more sombre, one could turn to the gradual and tract for Sexagesima. The booklet accompanying this volume argues that the offices of the three Sundays before Lent probably date from the Gregorian period, noting that their character fits in with the fear and uncertainty felt by the Roman people in the difficult years after the fall of the empire. After St. Paul's brilliant apologia in the day's Epistle comes the cry of a people who can feel dark clouds gathering, and look to God to justify them and destroy their enemies. The tract is much lighter, and this is characteristic of the time before Lent: we await the struggle with some foreboding, but equally we look forward with hope to the victory.
There is no limit to the amount one could say about the rich tapestry that is the Church's liturgy, but really the only way to take it all in is to live it, week by week and year by year. The Church is a wise mother, and she gives us everything we need in due measure: 'all things have their seasons', as Ecclesiastes tells us, and the times and moods of the Church are an anchor for us in a disordered world.
Let us say what L'année liturgique is, and what it isn't. There exist recordings of Gregorian chant that no set of superlatives can do justice to: one thinks immediately of the Passion of St. John by the Solesmes monks under Dom Gajard, or other recordings from Solesmes in the 1950s and 1930s, or those from Clervaux, or even in recent years from Fontgombault. These recordings will likely never be equalled, and demonstrate that even in the twentieth century, great contributions were made to the world's artistic patrimony. It would be quite unfair to judge the work at hand by these impossibly high standards. This is not a brilliant monastic choir: it is a very good choir of half a dozen talented amateurs. Nonetheless, they have achieved a quite remarkable work, the like of which simply doesn't exist: there is no other recording of many of the temporal Mass propers, and perfoming the whole year with a consistent style and interpretation is a monumental achievement that will probably stand alone for the foreseeable future.
The work sets out to be didactic. I am no singer, but it is clear to me that it succeeds admirably in this. The chant is uniformly accurate, unaffected, perfectly paced, and clearly sung. One thing to note, however, is that the schola reject the Gregorian gradual for Palm Sunday as 'amodal', and sing it instead to a simple psalm tone. As the CD notes point out, inclusion in the Graduale doesn't necessarily make something into a masterpiece; nonetheless, there will doubtless be scholas who choose to sing this gradual, and aesthetic concerns seem here to be taking precedence over didactic ones.
It is worth reiterating that the chant is extremely accurate, because that is critical to the success of the whole opus. By no means does this imply that the chant is mechanical or stilted: on the contrary, it is sung with a great deal of feeling and sensitivity, which helps bring out the subtle variations in mood between the different pieces and different seasons. The organ is used throughout, except for the graduals. This works well, and gives the chant added body. The voices here would certainly be strong enough to sing the chant for Advent and Lent unaccompanied, though this extra austerity is of course a matter of personal taste.
The decision to include only temporal offices has been rigidly applied, which has resulted in some slight oddities: for example, the Sacred Heart is included (the newer Mass, Cogitationes), while the finest new office since Aquinas, Christ the King, which always occurs on a Sunday, is omitted. One can always ask for more and more: in particular, recording the Magnificat antiphons for each Sunday would probably have been useful to quite a few scholas. I hope the Bellarministas consider applying their obvious energy to other projects. Recording all the temporal antiphons for Lauds and Vespers would be feasible, though this would obviously be of less general utility than the Mass propers. A selection of feasts from the Sanctorum would also be welcome, though of course there are already other recordings of most of the major feasts. (I should point out that they have already recorded the Kyriale, available separately on three CDs.)
Technically, the sound quality is perfectly acceptable, though it could perhaps be a little crisper at times. Each 2-CD volume comes in a double jewel case, which isn't terribly practical—unless you store your CDs on a very long bookshelf, the first thing you'll probably do is go and buy a more manageably size wallet for the collection. Each volume comes with an information booklet (in French), containing interesting, well-researched, but rather brief historical introductions to the liturgy of each season, together with short explanations for each of the texts (introit, gradual, alleluia or tract, offertory, communion) for each Mass. These are sometimes insightful, but often do no more than give a translation of the Latin: it seems to me that it would have been better to suppress these superfluous notes, and enhance those instead where there is something interesting to say.
All in all, though, this collection is an outstanding accomplishment, and I congratulate the Schola Bellarmina very sincerely for carrying it through. I hope it will sustain those who love the texts it contains, and introduce them to those who have never known them, until the happy day when they are sung once again in all the great churches of the West.
MT, 12/3/05
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