Advent marks the beginning of the Christian calendar with anticipation, hope, and penitence. Beginning four Sundays before Christmas and leading up to Christmas Eve, the season of Advent contains two important ideas: 1) the incarnation of Christ, 2) the second coming of Christ with judgment. While in modern times the second facet is often overlooked, the early Christian church, and thereby its Latin hymn-writers were quite concerned with the judgment, as they believed the world was quickly coming to a close. This time of preparation for the second coming occurred mostly during the first half of Advent, before December 16, after which the focus shifted more to the coming of the nativity scene. There are a number of Latin Advent hymns, some of which I will explore in upcoming weeks in terms of language, poetry, meaning, translation, and melody. Especially explored are the Latin Advent hymns of the Divine Office, which underwent severe alterations by Pope Urban VIII, as well as those by Charles Coffin, whose hymns have gained a much wider acceptance than those of the Office.
Pope Urban VIII
The first Latin hymns bore great resemblance to Greek forms, as Hilary of Poitiers (300-368) had spent some time in the East before bringing hymnody to the West. Saint Ambrose (ca. 337-397) followed Hilary’s lead, desiring that the music be pleasing to the public and easy for congregations to sing. Little did they know that 1,000 years later, their work would be undone by none less than the Pope himself. These popular music forms, along with the principle of prosody, among others, became of such importance to Renaissance poets that in 1629 Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, 1568-1644) appointed a committee to reform the prose of the Breviary, which would be published in 1632 and remain the official Roman Breviary until 1985. Urban VIII was himself a poet and hymn-writer, following classical Latin metrics, and was quite displeased with the ancient hymns’ similarity to popular forms, particularly the iambic bimeter, which was in common use in Greek poetry of the world, and ironically is the same meter now regarded as “long meter” (8.8.8.8.). It is widely thought that, though a committee was present, Urban himself did much of the reworking, or in some cases rewriting, of most of the hymns. Indeed, some hymns which were reworked bear little to no resemblance to their original forms, and could be called new hymns in their own rite, except that they intentionally replaced the originals. In fact, there were some 900 “corrections” to the Breviary, including modifying the opening lines of over thirty hymns.1 The issue was extremely controversial because the Roman church and monasteries had been singing the same version of some hymns for over a millennium, and the connection with such a history was of great importance to them.
The result (of their labours) has always given rise to very different judgments and for the most part unfavourable. It seemed to be exceedingly rash to regard as barbarous the hymns of men like Prudentius, Sedulius, Sidonius, Apollinaris, Venantius, St. Ambrose, St. Paulinus of Aquileia, and Rabanus Maurus and to desire to remodel them after the pattern of Horace’s Odes. . . . It is only fair to give them the credit, that out of respect for the wishes of Urban VIII. they treated these compositions with extreme reserve, and while they made some expressions clearer they maintained the primitive unction in a large number of passages.2
The Breviary underwent a number of additional changes by later Popes, but the hymns remained unchanged. In 1906, Pope Pius X (1835-1914) at least added the original texts to the appendix while keeping Urban’s modified texts in the Breviary itself. Finally, 1985 resulted in another reforming of the Roman Breviary, returning to the original hymn texts, but for well over 300 years, two distinct forms of the hymn were in existence. Although the official Roman Breviary was that of Urban VIII’s modified Breviary, some parts of the Church rejected the changes in favor of the original versions. Claiming an exemption granted by Pope Pius V (1504-1572) which allowed some of the church to decline the use of the new Breviary, the Dominicans, Benedictines, Cistercians, and Carthusians refused to adopt the revisions and retained the ancient hymn texts; additionally, there is great irony in the fact that neither St. Peter’s Basilica (which Urban dedicated himself) nor the Lateran in Rome adopted the changed edition.
© 2010, Mark Burnett. All rights reserved.
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