When the esteemed musicologist Walther Lipphardt died on 16 January 1981, his monumental commentary edition of medieval Easter dramatic ceremonies and liturgical dramas, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, remained unfinished. In addition to his commentary volume, which was drafted but not edited, Lipphardt had, at the very least, wished to include tables comparing musical variants.Footnote 1 According to Ute Evers and Johannes Janota, sadly, at the time of his death, he had only completed preliminary work towards this goal (1:xv). It would take more than three decades for this project to be realised, thanks to Evers and Janota, musicologist and philologist respectively. Equipped with the research files from Lipphardt's estate, which his son, Prof. Dr Hanns-Rudolf Lipphardt, donated to the Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg in 2006, and a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, they have published the long-anticipated musical edition of all extant notated Visitatio sepulchri dramas, to act as a companion to Lipphardt's text edition.
Die Melodien der lateinischen Osterfeiern, an edition with a commentary, has a great deal to offer musicologists and scholars of liturgical drama. After a detailed introduction that delimits the repertory and explains the organisational scheme of the edition, the remainder of the first volume, published in two separate parts, presents an edition of the Visitatio sepulchri chants and rubrics. The Visitationes are published in the same order that Lipphardt followed, with tropes, type 1, type 2 and type 3 Visitationes grouped together in that order, and the individual tropes and Visitationes further subdivided by provenance. In cases where the provenance of a source has changed, the editors maintain Lipphardt's order but publish the updated provenance in the heading for each edition, with Lipphardt's provenance given in parentheses. Volume 2, part 1, offers a detailed analysis of the melodic variants for all Visitatio sepulchri dramas (‘Zu den Melodien der lateinischen Osterfeiern’) and a study of text variants (‘Zur Textgestalt der lateinischen Osterfeiern’). An individual commentary for each Visitatio preserved with musical notation then follows (vol. 2, parts 1–2), which provides information about the manuscript, musical notation, musical and textual hallmarks, performance details and liturgical placement. Each commentary also identifies Visitationes that are musically or textually similar and lists relevant secondary literature, facsimiles and editions. The edition concludes with a bibliography and lists of abbreviations, manuscripts, printed editions and chants. For scholars who find the €399 cost prohibitive, or who are interested in certain parts of the edition but not others, De Gruyter sells PDF files of individual sections of the work.
The importance of Evers and Janota's edition cannot be overstated: this is the first time that the melodies of all 378 notated Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies have been brought together in one edition, as well as the first time that many of these melodies have been published. Scholars can easily compare the melodies of the Visitatio sepulchri from the entire area throughout which it was disseminated, from Spain and England in the West to Poland and Hungary to the East, and study changes to the melodies over time. The edition offers musical transcriptions for all Visitatio sepulchri dramas preserved in heightened notation, but makes no attempts at transcribing or collating melodies notated in unheightened neumes. Instead the editors supply images of the relevant folios, so that scholars can examine the neumes for themselves. The usefulness of such an edition is not limited to specialists in liturgical drama. It will also be valuable for the larger community of chant scholars, since Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies comprised a wide range of chant genres, including Office antiphons, tropes, sequences and strophic songs.
What is most impressive about Evers and Janota's edition is how well they handled the challenge of bringing Lipphardt's project to fruition more than thirty years after his death. Since important advances have occurred in liturgical drama scholarship in the intervening years, there was a serious risk that a project conceived so long ago might be outdated in its treatment of the subject and methodology. Fortunately, Evers and Janota have avoided these pitfalls by substantially addressing the recent secondary literature. They have significantly revised Lipphardt's entries on the dating, provenance and current location of the manuscripts in light of more recent scholarship and corrected errors in the edition. They also follow more recent trends in the literature by differentiating the various liturgical functions of the Quem queritis in sepulchro dialogue in the text commentary, which Lipphardt did not.Footnote 2
The editors judiciously build on the strongest aspects of Lipphardt's text edition but deviate from the earlier work when necessary. For example, they maintain his well-known numbering system for the Visitationes, but expand it with numbers starting in the 900s to accommodate twenty-five new examples. They also depart from his work by focusing solely on Visitatio sepulchri re-enactments and analysing them in depth, while excluding the Depositio crucis, Elevatio crucis, Ludus Paschalis and Peregrinus dramas from the edition. Even Evers and Janota's treatment of chant incipits differs – they only publish the text of the incipit, unlike Lipphardt who supplemented the missing text with a normalised version. The resulting commentary edition has a narrower focus, but offers an updated and more thorough treatment of the Visitatio.
The musical edition is informative and has an aesthetically pleasing page layout. The Lipphardt number, manuscript provenance, shelfmark, dating and folio numbers precede each Visitatio. Following this introductory material, the chants for each Visitatio are transcribed, along with the rubrics, in the same order as they appear in the manuscript. The overall formatting makes the music and rubrics highly readable for performance and study purposes. A random check of select chant transcriptions reveals that they are accurate. It should be noted, however, that the editors do not notate ligatures, and since this is not a diplomatic edition, certain spellings are normalised silently. For example, in addition to the more common standardisations, such as ae being normalised to e (i.e. praecedat becomes precedat) and u to v (uidi becomes vidi), they standardise the orthography of particular words, such as Iesus in place of Hiesus, Ihesus, Jesus, Jhesus, Yhesus, and others (for a partial list, see 1:xx, n. 10). While these differences in orthography may seem insignificant to the editors, what if the variants are meaningful for some readers or they become important later on? Fewer spellings should be standardised without a corresponding footnote giving the original manuscript reading. At the very least, readers deserve more than one footnote describing the generic orthography employed. The editors should also explain why certain spellings (i.e. Quem queritis in sepulcro ) are privileged over others (i.e. Quem queritis in sepulchro ), particularly when those spellings conflict with the conventional chant titles found in the musicological literature (1: xx, n. 10).
A minor criticism involves the aesthetics of certain notational signs. The slurs connecting multi-note neumes have inconsistent curves and starting and ending points throughout the edition. There is also unnecessary crowding in some transcriptions because the distropha and tristropha are represented by adjoining stemless note heads. Transcriptions with quilismas are similarly crowded, as the editors attach the quilisma symbol to the next note head. Introducing a small amount of space between the aforementioned glyphs would have improved the visual appeal of the edition significantly.
The thorough treatment of the chant texts in the textual commentary (‘Zur Textgestalt der lateinischen Osterfeiern’) was a pleasant surprise. Since 1967, Helmut de Boor's Die Textgeschichte der lateinischen Osterfeiern has been the only major philological study of the Visitatio sepulchri. However, for a number of years, this work has required updating for two main reasons: first, since de Boor's work pre-dated Lipphardt's text edition, he worked with far fewer sources of the Visitatio sepulchri than we know today, basing his regional groupings primarily on the sources published in Karl Young's The Drama of the Medieval Church from 1933.Footnote 3 The second issue is that de Boor's regional groupings lack transparency. When one returns to the primary sources that he grouped together, it is often difficult to comprehend why he identified certain textual variants and chants as hallmarks of a particular regional grouping, as they are present in some but not all the sources.
Janota's regional groupings are a significant improvement over de Boor’s. Unlike the earlier scholar, Janota disentangled the trope usage of Quem queritis from its use in the type 1 Visitatio, offering different regional groupings for each. These new regional groupings exhibit more consistent textual characteristics than de Boor's (2:105–45).Footnote 4 An equally important improvement is that Janota lists all the Visitationes that exhibit particular textual traits or employ certain chants, enabling scholars to determine easily which characteristics are common or unusual. It is important to mention that the text analysis only takes the notated sources into account, not the text-only manuscripts (2:103). Given the large number of sources that Janota analysed and the fact that the texts are often identical for notated and unnotated sources of the same provenance, it is unlikely that including the text-only sources would have affected Janota's groupings.
Both novice and seasoned liturgical drama scholars will find the commentaries on the individual Visitatio sepulchri dramas invaluable. They provide a quick point of reference for information about the manuscripts, salient musical and textual features, and other Visitatio re-enactments that are musically similar. The commentaries also alert scholars to any editions, facsimiles, plates in secondary sources, or online digital images of the folio(s) preserving a particular Visitatio. Anyone who enjoys visualising the geographical relationships among Visitationes from different localities will appreciate the editors’ efforts to indicate nearby cities, particularly in situations where the geographical location of the place of provenance may be unfamiliar to many.
There are some improvements that could have been made to the commentary on the music (‘Zu den Melodien der lateinischen Osterfeiern’). With few exceptions, Evers and Janota compare only the musical variants of chants that constitute the ‘core’ (Kern) of the three Visitatio sepulchri types.Footnote 5 In the case of the Quem queritis trope and type 1 Visitatio, they discuss melodic variants of only six chants (Quis revolvet nobis lapidem; O Deus quis revolvet nobis lapidem; Quem queritis in sepulchro; Alleluia. Resurrexit Dominus; Hodie resurrexit leo fortis; and Alleluia. Ad sepulchrum residens angelus). This number is extremely low when one considers that the German type 1 Visitationes alone drew on a collection of thirty-three chants.Footnote 6 While half of these chants can be excluded safely from the study of musical variants because they are rare, musical variants of the most frequently encountered chants should have been included (such as Surrexit enim (CAO 5081), Surrexit Dominus (CAO 5079) and Dicant nunc).Footnote 7 Once one takes into consideration the wide range of chants comprising type 1 Visitationes from France, England and elsewhere, the narrow focus on only six chants is all the more lamentable. The editors do mitigate the problem somewhat by briefly discussing the melodies of some additional chants in the commentaries on the individual Visitatio sepulchri manuscripts, but one wonders to what extent these chants were taken into account in determining the regional groupings for type 1 Visitationes (2:55–9).
For the chants that are analysed in depth, the comparison of musical variants is meticulous, but it is so detailed that it is almost unreadable. Interpolating more musical examples into the commentary would have improved the situation somewhat as would consistently using the chant names rather than Lipphardt's abbreviations, but the brevity of the authors’ conclusions constitutes the major weakness. For example, after devoting more than sixteen pages to comparing musical variants of the Quem queritis o tremule mulieres dialogue, the editors do not draw any conclusions about what the musical comparison has shown. In fact, they do not reach any conclusions until after having described the variants for all the type 2 Visitatio chants, thirteen pages later. This weakness would not seem so glaring if the conclusion were substantial, but because it occupies only a third of a page, it is dwarfed by all that preceded it (2:93).
One has to wonder if the conclusions are so brief because studying the variants of all Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies failed to clarify unresolved issues about the origins of the Quem queritis and the transmission of the Visitatio sepulchri. Now that all the known textual and musical evidence has been analysed, a comment from the editors on whether scholars are likely to ever know which (if any) of the extant sources of the Quem queritis preserve the dialogue in its original form and usage would be appreciated. This seems increasingly unlikely, given that by the tenth century (the earliest period from which sources of the Quem queritis survive), the dialogue was already widely disseminated and performed in different liturgical placements, with a wide array of musical and textual variants, as Evers and Janota's edition demonstrates.
Their work makes a significant scholarly contribution by showing just how complex the transmission of the Visitatio sepulchri and Quem queritis was. The analysis of musical variants demonstrates that entire chant melodies rarely resemble those from other religious communities; instead, short subsections of chants may resemble one another, but some subsections may relate to different groups of sources. The challenges of establishing transmission patterns are compounded once one takes into account the musical and textual variants of all the chants that comprise a particular Visitatio. These comparisons often suggest many points of contact among multiple sources, but do not create a coherent picture of filial relationships among manuscripts since the Quem queritis in sepulchro may resemble sources a, b and c at various points, while Quis revolvet nobis may be more similar to sources x and y. Given the complex relationships among manuscripts, it is difficult to reach strong conclusions about transmission in a traditional sense (i.e. by establishing filial relationships among sources). But we may be able to conclude that variability was crucial in the transmission of the Visitatio sepulchri and that, for whatever reason, religious communities felt at liberty to shape the re-enactment as they saw fit. Readers would appreciate if the editors had grappled with some of the fascinating issues that their data raises and considered how their findings might advance our knowledge about the transmission of the Visitatio sepulchri and Quem queritis.
The four main conclusions that the editors do draw about the music are invaluable and make an important contribution to the musicological study of the Visitatio sepulchri (2:98–9). First, they establish that standard liturgical chants are transmitted more consistently than those composed specifically for the Visitatio sepulchri. Second, the musical variants of the type 1 Visitatio sepulchri dramas follow a regional distribution, but those of the type 2 do not. Third, the melodies of Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies transmitted over many centuries at the same religious institution typically do not change. Fourth, and most important of all, the individual musical variants of the Quem queritis in sepulchro dialogue suggest certain regional groupings but entire melodies do not. As such, the detailed study of musical variants does not help to clarify questions about the origin of the Quem queritis dialogue.
Die Melodien der lateinischen Osterfeiern is an invaluable contribution to the study of the Visitatio sepulchri and to the field of chant studies. Through Evers and Janota's painstaking analyses of musical and textual variants and editing of all extant heightened melodies, they have performed a tremendous service to scholars of liturgical drama and the wider musicological community alike. It now remains for chant scholars to draw conclusions about whether the data confirms or challenges long accepted views about the Visitatio sepulchri. Whatever the outcome, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Evers and Janota for finally bringing to fruition a project that Lipphardt envisioned many years ago.
