The Nibelungenlied: with the Klage ed. by William Whobrey (review)

Abstract

the Passion [not ‘Hail Mother’ but ‘Hail Crown’]. [...] If Mary is the intercessor between the praying community and Christ, it is the Crown which serves that role in Verbum bonum et iocundum, mediating between Christ, the Franks, and the Kingdom of France along with its kings and queens’ (pp. 74–76). The Marian sequence in question was ubiquitous, belonging to a complex of popular, widely disseminated sequences. Any listener attentive to the Crown sequence would have experienced recollection of the original Marian text simultaneously with its reinterpretation, the Crown text. As Maurey puts it: ‘The sequences, then, are rife with hidden polyphonies harmonizing more than their apparent constituent parts in ways that bring to the fore the confluence of melodies, allusions, allegories, and meanings’ (p. 17). It is indeed remarkable that given all the feasts added to the Church calendar during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, none, not even Corpus Christi, made a greater contribution to the repertoire of sequences than did these two feast days, as celebrated at Sainte-Chapelle. Remarkable though they are as a group, they were but part of a number of Mass and Office complexes, and they are therefore related to other poetic and narrative texts specially composed at Saint-Chapelle, for example, the readings at Matins. Maurey provides examples of these texts in two of his book’s eight appendices, namely, a critical edition and translation of the Historia susceptionis coronae spinae (Appendix 7) and the Lessons for the Reception of Relics (Appendix 8). By tackling a manageable number of liturgically delimited sequences Maurey has succeeded in providing an excellent introduction and fascinating insight into a musical genre which, for all its undoubted aesthetic appeal, is by no means easy to take the full measure of. In so doing he has shown just how persuasive a tool in prosecuting political objectives could be the artistic fusion of liturgy and music. Robert Curry, The University of Sydney