Alma Redemptoris Mater (Gregorian chant)
Aurelio Porfiri
Among the Marian antiphons that were and are still performed at the end of Mass or during the Marian months, certainly the Salve Regina and Regina Coeli would win in popularity. Nevertheless, the typical antiphon for the season of Advent and Christmas, Alma Redemptoris Mater, certainly does not look out of place alongside them. To speak of this antiphon we must refer to its author and take a long journey through time, up to 11th century Germany.
Here, on 18 July 1013, by Count Wolfrat of Altshausen, a child was born who, from the very beginning, tasted the “valley of tears” which is life. In fact he had problems with his lower limbs. Historians do not tell us with certainty about the exact moment of this sort of paralysis, whether from birth or in early childhood. The father Count sent the boy, at the age of 7, to the Abbey of San Gallo (this at least as reported by the biographer Bucelino). After his studies, the boy wore the Benedictine habit and was a professor in Reichenau where, after a life of hard study marked by physical difficulties due to his infirmity, surrounded by the esteem of the great of the time, he died on 24 September 1054, at the age of 41. He was buried in his father’s estates but the exact location of the tomb is not known today. He wrote numerous apologetic, poetic and historical texts (such as his Universal Chronicle). His name was purely German, Ermanno, which means “warrior.” Due to his deformity, which caused his limbs to contract with great suffering of ours, he was known as Hermannus Contractus, Herman the cripple.
Thanks to Migne’s Latin Patrology we have some important information about our Ermanno, such as the biographical note of his disciple Bertoldo. He informs us that Ermanno was admired by all for his holiness of life and doctrine (and seems to indicate June 18 as a birth date, not July), that he was a student of St Gallen and that he would sit on a chair especially prepared because of his infirmity. He was “catholicae veritatis assertor et defensor invictissimus.” Giovanni Egone, in his work De viris illustribus Augiae Divitis attributes to him the composition of the Salve Regina and of Alma Redemptoris Mater, along with other compositions, including the Sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus. This information is confirmed in other medieval sources, also available in the Migne collection. So we take this attribution as extremely plausible.
For the melody we know two versions, the solemn one and the simple one. Dom Gajard, in his Les plus belles Mélodies Grégoriennes, refers to the Alma Redemptoris Mater as certainly attributable to Ermanno. Dom Gajard argues that the solemn tone is closer to modern scales than to the authentic Gregorian mode, although this melody can be traced back to at least the 12th century, a date which can be found in various manuscripts. Dom Gajard argues that “elle est même de beaucoup la moins intéressante des quatre antiennes.” He attributes the simple tone, much more widespread, to an elaboration made in Solesmes by Dom Fonteinne. I don’t know if he refers to Léandre Fonteinne, a monk of Solesmes with an adventurous life who took him to Western Australia in the monastery called “New Norcia”.
To Dom Gajard’s critique of the melody of the solemn tone, we can counter it with what Christopher Page says in his The Christian West and Its Singers, referring to Ermanno’s style with reference to his antiphon to the Magnificat, Gaudeat tota. He claims that composers like Ermanno, or whoever for him, were trying new solutions with respect to the Gregorian mode, almost avant-garde solutions.
The text immediately identifies Mary as the Holy Mother of the Redeemer, always open door of heaven and star of the sea. The various references to the hymn Ave Maris Stella suggest that Alma may have been inspired by this hymn. In fact, reading the antiphon carefully, it is quite easy to see clear references to the beautiful Marian hymn against the light. The verse in which people are asked to help the people who fall but who always yearn to rise again is really beautiful. We ask this of Mary because it is She who generated the wonder of nature, the Lord Jesus. She who was Virgin before and after childbirth, the new Eve who had received the Hail from the mouth of the archangel Gabriel, may she intercede for mercy for us sinners.
In his encyclical called Redemptoris Mater (1987) it is not by chance that Saint John Paul II states: “Mary is definitively introduced into the mystery of Christ through this event: the Annunciation by the angel. This takes place at Nazareth, within the concrete circumstances of the history of Israel, the people who first received God’s promises. The divine messenger says to the Virgin: ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you’ (Lk. 1:28). Mary ‘was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be’ (Lk. 1:29): what could those extraordinary words mean, and in particular the expression ‘full of grace’ (kecharitoméne).
“If we wish to meditate together with Mary on these words, and especially on the expression ‘full of grace,’ we can find a significant echo in the very passage from the Letter to the Ephesians quoted above. And if after the announcement of the heavenly messenger the Virgin of Nazareth is also called ‘blessed among women’ (cf. Lk. 1:42), it is because of that blessing with which ‘God the Father’ has filled us ‘in the heavenly places, in Christ.’ It is a spiritual blessing which is meant for all people and which bears in itself fullness and universality (“every blessing”). It flows from that love, which in the Holy Spirit, unites the consubstantial Son to the Father. At the same time, it is a blessing poured out through Jesus Christ upon human history until the end: upon all people. This blessing, however, refers to Mary in a special and exceptional degree: for she was greeted by Elizabeth as ‘blessed among women.’
“The double greeting is due to the fact that in the soul of this ‘daughter of Sion’ there is manifested, in a sense, all the ‘glory of grace,’ that grace which ‘the Father…has given us in his beloved Son.’ For the messenger greets Mary as ‘full of grace’; he calls her thus as if it were her real name. He does not call her by her proper earthly name: Miryam (= Mary), but by this new name: ‘full of grace.’ What does this name mean? Why does the archangel address the Virgin of Nazareth in this way?
“In the language of the Bible ‘grace’ means a special gift, which according to the New Testament has its source precisely in the Trinitarian life of God himself, God who is love (cf. 1 Jn. 4:8). The fruit of this love is ‘the election’ of which the Letter to the Ephesians speaks. On the part of God, this election is the eternal desire to save man through a sharing in his own life (cf. 2 Pt. 1:4) in Christ: it is salvation through a sharing in supernatural life. The effect of this eternal gift, of this grace of man’s election by God, is like a seed of holiness, or a spring which rises in the soul as a gift from God himself, who through grace gives life and holiness to those who are chosen. In this way there is fulfilled, that is to say there comes about, that ‘blessing’ of man ‘with every spiritual blessing,’ that ‘being his adopted sons and daughters…in Christ,’ in him who is eternally the ‘beloved Son’ of the Father.”
The melody (we are referring here to the solemn tone, deriving the simple one from this) opens with a neuma elaborated on the first tonic syllable, Al-[ma], reinforced by a semitone quilism that leads the melody to an upward “outburst”. This “Alma” seems unable to contain the holiness of Mary, the greatest of the Saints. Even the “[Porta] manes” seems, with that right fifth, a Pythagorean perfect consonance, to want to confirm with absolute certainty how great is the welcoming goodness of Mary, which she never ceases to welcome.
Follow
