Parish Mag, February 2009

The text that follows appeared in St Oswald's parish mag in February 2009.  The supporting documents, above, are taken from 'Suñol, Dom Gregory, and Durnford, G M: Textbook of Gregorian chant according to the Solesmes method; Desclée & Co, Belgium, [1929]' in an on-demand reprint from www.kessinger.net

When you’ve sung Hark the Herald 143 times since the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, which starts in about June, and when you’ve sung it 143 times a year for about the last 60 years, you could be forgiven, I think, for giving a deep sigh, even groan, and thinking “here we go again.”

Yes, I know it’s tradition, and we’ve all got to go through it, and in church we don’t actually sing it until Advent is nearly done, and we can all sing it from memory anyway (and get the words right - you know, the words some minor official decided had to be changed in case a Guardian reader or America might be offended), but sometimes you do yearn for something different; something that hasn’t been blared at you in shopping arcades for months and months and months in upbeat arrangements with drum machines and soupy strings and highly trained Disney vocalising agents so that when it’s time to celebrate the birth of Jesus you are heartily sick of the whole wretched business, not to mention flat broke.

So in our household we have a secret store of recordings of Christmas music that only see the light of day once a year, for a couple of weeks from Christmas Eve, and with them we refresh our ears, then at Epiphany they go back into the box until next year.

This year’s private gem chez No 9 was going to be Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s gay and enchanting Messe de Minuit (ca 1690), but unfortunately we can’t find it. At least, we can’t find the recording I wanted to spend Christmas with - the one with “authentic” French pronunciation of the Latin text.

 As you are all aware (are you not?), we choir persons, when we are required to sing in the Latin tongue, have to know that there are now two main ways of pronouncing the language - the Italian way and the German way (Italian - “Eggshell-seess”; German “Eck-sell-siss”).  Get it wrong and you will be a laughing-stock among the cognoscenti (“con-yo-shenty”)

But in Charpentier’s time French people had their own way of singing Latin (as you would, if you were French), and it would have been to the sound of Latin as pronounced by French people that Charpentier set the texts

So I was a little peeved a few years ago when I was invited to a sing-along Messe de Minuit at Bretton Hall in Wakefield to discover that we were going to sing it in Italian Latin, not in the old French pronunciation I had come to love.  I did remonstrate with our Leader, an eminent early-musicologist from the North-East Early Music Society, but I was slapped down pretty sharply.  “Whay-ay mon”, he pronounced, wisdomfully.  “They never sang it like that. It was all the invention of a discredited French scholar whose name I have conveniently forgotten.”

Ah indeed.  And I would have forgotten, too, if I hadn’t come across an exchange of letters [above] between Pope Pius X, Cardinal Dubois of Paris, and Pope Pius XI in the early 1900s, in which Cardinal Dubois dutifully agreed that the way that Latin was spoken in France did indeed render it incomprehensible to the rest of the Roman Catholic Communion.

So - “they never sang it like that”?  Excusez-moi?  Time for les devoirs,  je croix, mes chers amis de la Société Nord-Est de la Musique Ancienne. Also hé-hon, hé-hon, hé-hon, which is roughly French for yah-boo-sucks..