The publication of the complete works of St Bernard begun by Editions du Cerf in 1993 continues with this edition of texts and melodies of the Office of St Victor, a hermit of Arcis-sur-Aube (Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, no. 8564). In the twelfth century, the abbot of Montiéramey asked Bernard to compose the text of an Office celebrating the merits of this saint, whose relics were at that time kept in the church. By way of preparation for the publication of the pieces of chant for this Office and their translation, this volume comprises a first introduction by Dom Gérard Dubois on the Cistercian liturgical reforms (pp. 23–48) and a second by Claire Maître on the history of the chant reforms commissioned by St Bernard, their date, authorship and textual witnesses.Footnote ¹ The introduction to the text, the notes and the edition of the last four lessons were done by Fr Bernard de Vrégille, who was also responsible for translating the whole text.

These preliminaries lead to an edition (and performance, on the accompanying CD) of the Office of St Victor, whose texts were sent by St Bernard to Guy, abbot of Montiéramey, between 1140 and 1147, together with letter no. 398, edited and translated by Christiane Cosme (pp. 120–5). At the end of the second paragraph of this letter, the abbot of Clairvaux insists on the best way of performing liturgical chant, with the same advice that he had given to his own monks in a sermon to the Chapter (Sermon 47: PL 173, col. 1011C, re-edited in the Sources chrétiennes). The hagiographic texts were copied in the manuscripts Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Faculté de Médecine H 14 (p. 108, pl. XIV) and Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 426 and 1484; the chants of the Office are notated in the antiphoner Troyes, BM 721 (pp. 110–12, pls. I–XIII), written in the south of Champagne or Burgundy, before reaching Montiéramey. Unfortunately, this manuscript was trimmed in binding, sometimes cropping the notes at the top of folios, and it has also been worn by use. Moreover, some passages have been subject to later corrections, as recorded in the transcription (p. 255).

To avoid these unfortunate drawbacks, it would have been preferable to substitute the Troyes antiphoner with the large noted breviary of Montiéramey, from the end of the twelfth century (BNF lat. 796, Noailles 13), described by Canon Leroquais in his catalogue of Bréviaires manuscrits (II, p. 449). The Royal Library acquired this manuscript in 1740 as part of the collection of the Maréchal de Noailles, who had received it from his brother the Cardinal de Noailles, bishop of Châlons from 1680 to 1695. In 1964, Joseph Smits van Waesberghe had reported that the outer dimensions of several illuminated initials in this breviary were calculated according to the numerical proportions of simple musical consonances,Footnote ² a circumstance which suggests a special interest in the ars musica at Montiéramey. The chants are written on three lines, plus a red F-line. The complete Office In sollempnitate sancti Victoris patronis nostri is notated on f. 251, with the lessons followed by their responsories, following usual practice: the homily of the Third Nocturn is part of the Homiliary of Montiéramey, which is derived largely from the lectionary of Cluny.Footnote ³

In 1959, Dom Jean Leclercq discovered in the library of the Seminary of Verdun ‘Un missel de Montiéramey’ (Scriptorium, 13 (1959), 247–49, pls. 27–30), written in a formal hand, decorated with drolleries and notated with square notes on lines around 1235: the calendar has for 10 October the Translatio sancti Victoris patris nostri with octave and for 23 October the Dedicatio ecclesiae Aremarensis, exactly as in the large noted breviary of the end of the twelfth century. By contrast, in the antiphoner Troyes 721, used for this edition of the Office, the date of the dedication was added in a second hand in the thirteenth century. Moreover, the order of responsories of the Office of the Dead in the antiphoner and the breviary is different: Troyes 721 follows the list of St Vannes in Lorraine, while that in lat. 796 adopts the order of Metz.

A third manuscript of Montiéramey, the Breviary/Book of Hours of Abbé Jean Vernin (BNF lat. 1063, Colbert 4889), completed on 20 November 1417, confirms that in the fifteenth century the feasts of St Victor are still shown in the calendar and his patronage is still invoked in the Litany, just as in the missal in the thirteenth century.

If the texts of the Office edited by Claire Maître and carefully translated by Esther Lenaerts-Lachapelle are indeed from the pen of St Bernard,Footnote ⁴ then the question of the composition of the melodies remains to be elucidated, since neither St Bernard nor Peter the Venerable had sufficient knowledge or expertise for the musical elaboration of their literary productions. However, an analysis of the melodies of the Office of St Victor reveals that the composer has not complied fully with the principles of the chant reform developed in the Regulae of Guy d'Eu. In practice, the standards for Cistercian chant were documented in the Tonale sancti Bernardi, a text best consulted not in the Patrologia Latina (as suggested on p. 63) but in the critical edition by Christian Meyer, based on the copies transcribed at the end of the oldest Cistercian antiphoners.Footnote ⁵ In fact, for five first-mode antiphons the composer has prescribed the melismatic Psalm tone that was eliminated from the Cistercian tonary, and he has ornamented the reprise of the nocturnal responsories with long melismas which again contravene Cistercian practice, but which reflect the practice of the twelfth century (p. 100).

Based on these observations, it is not possible to state that the melodies of the Office of St Victor were centonised in accordance with the Regulae of the reform under the personal patronage of St Bernard; but as the texts of the antiphons and responses were destined for Guy, abbot of Montiéramey, one might rather expect to find the composer of the melodies moving in Benedictine circles. In this perspective, it is very probably Nicolas de Montiéramey, sometime secretary to St Bernard, who ought to be decreed creator of all these beautiful melodies to celebrate the patron of his monastery. Indeed, the list of sequences that Nicolas had composed and copied into the manuscript BL Harley 3073, dedicated to Count Henri, includes the sequence Gaude Syon et exulta for St Victor,Footnote ⁶ which Bernard could not have written, since this liturgical genre, along with tropes, had been banned from the Cistercian repertory. Moreover, after the letter of dedication to Count Henri, Nicolas added lessons and responses de cruce and de virgine, the publication of which was recommended by Calvin Bower (Révue de musicologie, 83 (1997), 146–8): the style of these new responsories can obviously be compared with those of the Office of St Victor. And finally, Nicolas, as an intermediary between his own abbot and St Bernard, ought to have known the problems of notation in use among the Cistercians, since he cites, on fol. 121v, the antiphon Deus noster factus est nobis, which the Regulae of Guy d'Eu (p. 156 in Claire Maître's edition) cite as an example of a chant that is impossible to notate according to the rules.

Given this evidence that the melodies for the Office of St Victor are not Cistercian in origin, we must look elsewhere for a closer witness to the compositional principles of the Cistercian reform, for if the Office of St Victor is indeed ‘la seule œuvre liturgique connue de Bernard de Clairvaux’, as the cover tells us, then we should look in the large collection of Bernard's works from Anchin, Douai, Bibliothèque municipale 372/1, copied sometime before 1165, in which there is a notated Office for St Malachy O'Morgair, directly inspired by the Vita sancti Malachiae episcopi of St Bernard (BHL 5188) and celebrating the merits of the bishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux on the night of 1 to 2 November 1148.Footnote ⁷ The very complex history of this Office has been unravelled by the specialist in the Cistercian chant reforms, the late Chrysogonus Waddell OCSO;Footnote ⁸ in effect, it fell to him to explain why the Cistercian Office of Malachy, canonised by Pope Clement III on 6 July 1190, had been adopted at Clairvaux only in 1257, to replace the Office of the Common of Confessors, while this Office had already been copied and recorded at Anchin before 1165. The text of this Office was kept at Clairvaux to be sung in choir as soon as the saint had been canonised in Rome, but that decision was delayed until 1190. Meanwhile, Abbot Goswin of Anchin, a friend and admirer of Bernard, had asked for the Cistercian Office of St Malachy to be sent from Clairvaux to Anchin in 1162, to be integrated into their copy of the collected works of St Bernard, who had died in 1153, but not to be sung in the choir of the Benedictine abbey.

In 1174, the proper Office for the feast of the newly canonised St Bernard had borrowed several elements from the Office of St Malachy, who was not to be canonised until sixteen years later, in 1190. ‘Typically Cistercian’, according to Waddell, the latter Office is transmitted in six manuscripts from Clairvaux preserved at the Bibliothèque municipale in Troyes: an unnotated antiphoner of the twelfth century (Troyes MS 574, olim Clairvaux Z 41) and five breviaries.Footnote ⁹ When compared with the Office in the Anchin manuscript (Waddell, pp. 143–8), it appears that the Office in the Clairvaux manuscripts was revised before replacing in 1257, only at Clairvaux, the Common of Confessor-Pontiffs imposed by the General Chapter in 1190.

The Anchin manuscript is our only means of studying the melodies of the Office of St Malachy, but for the ninth responsory, Sanctus pontifex, there are also three Cistercian processionals, two of them in the use of Clairvaux, the only survivals from the collection of thirty-eight processionals listed in the inventory of manuscripts compiled by Abbot Jean de Cirey between 1480 and 1482. In the second of these (Troyes, BM 1958), the notator had the novel idea of notating this responsory on a four-line stave ruled in green ink.Footnote ¹⁰ The hitherto unpublished melodies of this Proper Office, described by Waddell as ‘typically Cistercian’ through their organisation and choice of melodies in the order of eight modes of the Tonale Sancti Bernardi, would certainly deserve a critical edition with translation and recording as part of the series of Sources chrétiennes. As a result, the studies of the chant reforms at the start of this book, which were not applied to the composition of the melodies for the Office of St Victor, would regain their rightful place in governing the composition of the Cistercian Office of St Malachy, the partial source of the Office of St Bernard.

Mention should finally be made of the excellent recording of the Office of St Victor d'Arcis by the Gregorian choir ‘Ambrosiniens’ of Dijon, under the leadership of Fr Robin. This choir of men's voices was founded under the patronage of St Ambrosianus, whose relics were deposited on 13 September 1171 in the altar of the crypt of St Stephen's church in Dijon by archbishop Guichard of Lyons. Their disc allows the aesthetic qualities of the performance ‘not to interfere with understanding the text, but rather to enrich it’, following the advice of Bernard in his letter to Guy, abbot of Montiéramey.