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Delectamentum

The title of this record has three levels of meaning. Delectus = selection: this points to the programme of the record, which is the result of a very special selection. Delectamentum = delight: this implies that the record makes a delightful music – a medieval delicacy, one could say – audible, some of it for the first time in the modern age. And: "Panem de caelo praestitisti eis, omne delectamentum in se habentem – Thou didst send them Bread from heaven having in itself every delight": this is the most frequently quoted biblical verse of the feast Corpus Christi, and so the title refers to the solemnity (or feast) from which the material for this record was drawn.

The solemnity of Corpus Christi is the product of the mature Middle Ages. Since Maundy Thursday falls in the time of the feast of Jesus' Passion, after the Paschal season was over people wanted to commemorate the sacrament given during the Last Supper. One (negative) factor contribu-ting to the foundation of the feast was the medieval heretics denying the "real presence" of Christ in the sacrament. Finally, the devotion of a nun made the feast accepted, and in 1264 the Pope spread the feast to the whole of the Latin Church. The founding bull was prepared by Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the age, and he was probably the author of a great part of the solemn liturgy.

Being a late medieval feast, the liturgy also required new chants. A small part of them could be taken from the inherited repertory (such as the introit and gradual of the Mass); the majority, however, were new compositions, in the new style of Plainchant rather than the traditional Gregorian tone. In contrast to the classic shapes of Plainchant these pieces are mostly melodious, sometimes almost romantic, striving for deep expression and emotional impact. The texts of the Mass (except the Sequence) and some parts of the Office were taken from the Bible, and there are also texts representing the theological meditations of the Church Fathers in a free, poetic form.

Concerning the music, the tradition of the Dominican order (Blackfriars) is predominant in this recording, firstly because the 12^th-13^th century was a time when the order flourished greatly; secondly, because the theologian of the feast, Thomas Aquinas was himself a Dominican friar, and thridly, because their individual repertory and set of music variants is almost unknown even to educated listeners and experts.

This recording consist of two parts. The first offers a selection of special traditions in the field of Divine Office. We have taken pieces primarily from the genre of the ornamented melodies of responsories.

The Office cycle attributed to Thomas Aquinas eventually spread to most parts of Europe. Since it was, however, a new feast, a uniform usage was not prescribed. In some ecclesiastical centers (especially immediately after the feast was introduced) used rather different sets, as documented in the early manuscripts.

The first piece is a rare hymn, from a Dominican choirbook. Interestingly, it also borrows lines from other hymns, putting the quoted material into a new context.

Then follow some items taken from a rare Office recorded in a codex from Hungary. The thirteenth-century Notated Missal of Esztergom does not contain the vulgate festal office, but as an archaism, a cycle hardly known elsewhere. Two antiphons (2 and 6) are taken from there, and both are good examples of the slightly "sentimental" style of the Middle Ages. Two responsories taken from the same manuscript (3 and 4) follow old models, but the traces of the new style are palpable. The Melchisedec antiphon (5) is from a Bohemian source, and is an example of the style flourishing in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Prague (the Hussites included). A special feature of this piece is that in place of closing melisma a small poetic section (trope) is inserted in the popular tone of the age, followed by the reprise of the second part of the antiphon.

The next section offers two responsories, taken from a Dominican Antiphonale (from Vienna), not known from anywhere else. The responsories are ornate melodies that in the liturgy follow the longer readings. In this recording, the reading by Thomas Aquinas is recited according to the tradition of the Dominicans, as notated in the "Normalbuch" of the order (Nr. 8, 10, 12). The first and second readings are accompanied with poetic responsories composed in the medieval music style (9, 11), while the third reading is followed by the old Christian hymn, the Te Deum, in the Dominican variant (Nr. 13).

The second part of the record allows us to listen to the chants generally accepted in the Mass, again sung according to the old customs of the Dominican order. The introit and gradual (Nr. 15, 17) were taken from the repertory of the first millennium. Between the two, the Epistle of the Mass is also recited in the Dominican tone (Nr. 16). The alleluia (Nr. 18) is an earlier melody originating in the Franco-Roman period, but adapted to the text of the new feast. The Winchester Troper completed the original alleluia by adding a sequence of long melismas that could be sung on greater feastdays at the return of the refrain. Though these were probably never combined with the Dominican melody, we have inserted them as characteristic of medieval embellishments. Each melismatic section sounds twice. From these, the genre of the poetic sequence later formed, when syllables were added to each note of the embellishment; the same motive was sung twice in the sequence too but to different texts.

The Sequence of Corpus Christi, however, was not a descendent of this alleluia: it was written by Thomas Aquinas to a fashionable Paris tune (Nr. 19). The offertorium and communion chant of the Mass show the music style around 1000, adapted however, to new texts selected for the feast (Nr. 20, 21).

The mystery of the Corpus Christi was greatly emphasized in the theology and spirituality of the age. No wonder, then, that throughout the Middle Ages composers willingly set texts about it to music, or more precisely: they created polyphonic works in their individual styles using eucharistic chants as basic melodies (cantus firmus). In this recording we have selected cycles of three such works, composed by the greatest master of the 15th century, Guillaume Du Fay. The first (Sanctus Ave verum corpus, 7) inserts as a trope amongst the sections of the liturgical piece the lines of a favoured paraliturgical chant on the Eucharist. The second (Pange lingua, 14) is an artistic setting to the liturgical hymn of the feast, and the third (Lauda Sion, 19) is a composition for the text of the sequence of the feast, which alternates the chant melody with a polyphonic arrangment.

László Dobszay