Many decades of research on Hungarian chant have resulted in editions of most of the repertory and a thorough knowledge of its practice and preservation in notated manuscripts. The last frontier, Eastern Hungary, and the characteristics of its rites, chant and manuscript witnesses, have been the focus of the most recent research. The three publications reviewed here present significant late medieval manuscript sources from this region: a three-volume book about an antiphoner from Várad, a study of fourteen fragments of Eastern Hungarian origin but not matching any known source, and a study of an office of the dead and hymnal from Zagreb.
The Antiphonale Varadinense is a three-volume publication of which the first two volumes present high-quality colour facsimiles of an unnumbered manuscript in the Diocesan Treasury and Library of Győr, an elaborately decorated, large, but fragmentary late fifteenth-century antiphonal destined for the cathedral of Várad (or Oradea in modern-day Romania). Its two originally separate volumes, of the Temporale and Sanctorale with commune, were bound together in 1872; they now lack the beginning and end and some intervening leaves that survive as fragments, mostly kept in regional libraries. This manuscript is one of several with the liturgy of the diocese of Transylvania-Várad that were indexed for Corpus Antiphonalium Officii–Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae volumes VII-A–B, Transylvania-Várad Temporale and Sanctorale, edited by Andrea Kovács and published in 2010.
Vol. I includes an overview of the repertory in the antiphonal and an explanation of the tables and critical apparatus; a table listing the main manuscript, fragments, and ‘carrier’ books, which were bound by the fragments; a table of abbreviations; the index of the chants of the Temporale with the critical apparatus in footnotes; and the facsimile of the fragmentary codex that is smaller in size than the original and reconstructed with the fragments in their correct order: the present front cover, fragments, fols. 1r–179v of the Győr manuscript with some fragments interspersed, and some further fragments. The source and recto folio number are given at the bottom of each page. Vol. II similarly has an index of the chants of the Sanctorale and commune with a critical apparatus in the footnotes, followed by the facsimile of the Sanctorale and commune: fragments, fols. 1r–138v of the Győr manuscript with some fragments interspersed, more fragments and the present back cover.
Vol. III is a substantial study of the reconstructed antiphoner and its content in four chapters. Chapter 1 has descriptions of the notation, illumination, dating and discussion of the possible origin of the antiphonal, as well as an account of the present state of research. Written by one scribe in unique and impeccable Czech rhombic notation not found in other Hungarian manuscripts and richly decorated by Czech and Moravian illuminators, the antiphoner, which has no traces of use, was destined for János Filipecz, a diplomat for King Matthias Corvinus who served as bishop of Várad from 1476 to 1490 and copied books and possibly musical notation. In the 1970s Janka Szendrei, László Dobszay and Gabor Proszéky identified Filipecz as the intended recipient, whose biography is described. The fragments were located and studied over the past half-century. Chapter 2 provides a history of the cathedral of Várad and its liturgical manuscripts, which were often inventoried (a summary of the data in the inventories is on pp. 177–8) through to the modern period, with an emphasis on the career of Bishop Filipecz and mostly on the inventories of the sixteenth century. The history of this now multipartite book after 1490 is obscure as is the reason why some leaves were removed, since some fragments were cut and not evidently to collect initials. Chapter 3 includes descriptions of the two fascicles of the antiphoner bound together and now in Győr, the many fragments of it (presented in tables on pp. 181–203), mostly in Budapest, Debrecen, Bratislava, Cluj-Napoca and Modia (with a map of their distribution on p. 208), and the ‘carrier books’ they bound (listed on pp. 210–21). Chapter 4 is an analytical overview of the chant repertory of the codex in the Temporale and Sanctorale and commune (among them Adalbert, James, Anne, Martha, Peter in Chains, Mary of the Snow, the Transfiguration, Lawrence, Hippolytus, Stephen King of Hungary, Exaltation of the Cross, Jerome and Demitrius).
The conclusions of Vol. III summarise many years of research not only on the Várad antiphoner but also on all Hungarian chant sources and situate the antiphoner as consistently distant from the main Hungarian tradition of Esztergom even though ‘structural ties’ exist. The research confirms that the Temporale of the Várad antiphoner, like the Temporale in most manuscripts, displays the liturgical structure and components of its chant tradition most reliably, but that the Sanctorale includes more changes reflecting local, even random decisions, and personal contacts. Here some defining characteristics of Eastern Hungarian manuscripts were found, such as the content of the historiae of Stephen and John the Evangelist and the order of items for Matins of Whit Monday, as well as the unique Várad series of antiphons for Matins of the Epiphany. Yet apparently singular East Hungarian or Várad elements listed here were found, sometimes often, in other central European or even German or Austrian sources. At the same time, some elements corresponded to the central Esztergom tradition, and some were not exclusive to Hungary but international. In some cases, such as the historia of the Apocalypse and the responsories and verses of Matins of Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima Sundays, they reflected the earliest chant sources of Western Europe, in other cases an early Hungarian layer of chant with some influences from Italy and Normandy. Researchers will next analyse eleventh-century sources pertaining to Hungarian liturgy and the Sanctorale of a thirteenth-century Hungarian breviary that was discovered and discussed by Gábriel Szoliva in 2019, and apply digital techniques to the known sources. The volume ends with a bibliography; list of sources, editions, repertories, and online inventories; and an index of chants – antiphons, invitatories, prolix and short responsories, hymns, versicles, and tropes to the responsories. Antiphonale Varadinense makes available years of study on the chant traditions of the archdiocese of Várad and while identifying diverse local features also helps to delimit the reach of the central and oldest Hungarian archdiocese of Esztergom.
The second publication under discussion here, Mosaics of the Plainchant Tradition of Transylvania, provides an analysis, colour facsimile and transcription of fourteen fragments from a single fourteenth-century antiphoner from the library of the Franciscan monastery in Güssing, Austria (formerly Németújvár in Hungary), numbered 4/4, 4/30, 4/48, 4/49, 4/68, 4/80, 4/82, 4/116, 4/119, 4/124, 4/137, 4/142, 4/273 and 19/40/b, and listed with their ‘carrier books’ on page 98. This library is uniquely important because its books pertaining to Hungarian church history have been kept there from the late Middle Ages until today. The short but comprehensive study includes an introduction to the library, codicological assessment of the fourteen fragments, state of research on Transylvanian chant manuscripts, discussion of the manuscripts with which the melodies of the fragments were compared, and analyses of the musical notation, liturgical evidence and chant melodies to determine the place of origin of the antiphoner. A summary and three appendices consisting of two maps and a list of the Hungarian manuscripts used for comparison precede the facsimiles of the fragments (which can also be seen at http://fragmenta.zti.hu) and transcriptions of the visible chant. Since the fragments still cover books, only one side of each is visible, which shows damage from wear, overwriting and shelf numbers pasted on it.
The fourteen fragments from the end of the summer Sanctorale include fifty chants mostly from Matins but also from Vespers and Lauds for the Nativity of the Virgin, Exaltation of the Cross, Elizabeth, Cecilia and Catherine. They are only some of the 105 parchment fragments in the library, many of which have not yet been studied. From graduals, antiphoners, notated breviaries and missals of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, many were used to cover theological books belonging to the Batthyány family. Another set of twenty-five fragments is from a single book, and there may be other such sets.
The search for the origin of this antiphoner begins with analyses of the script and notation of the fragments. One scribe wrote the texts first, then adjusted the melody to it with some difficulty; isolated custodes appear. The imperfections in text and inconsistently drawn neume shapes, the haphazardly written rubrics and irregular or missing abbreviations of genre, and errors in copying repetenda led to the conclusion that the antiphoner was intended for singers who already knew the liturgy and copied by a scribe from a lower-ranking church with a good musical education and ‘individual notions’. His energetic rounded gothic rotunda script with Italian elements of the Angevin period identified by Janka Szendrei are common in Transylvanian music manuscripts. Here, the punctum, clivis, climacus, scandicus and custodes of the fragments were compared with an early fourteenth-century neumed missal from Esztergom; many colour images illustrate this thorough discussion that is elegantly and precisely translated into English. The neumes have affinities to notations of Transylvania, Várad, or further northwest, but no exact match was found. Features of old and new notations led to the conclusion that the book was from the late or end of the fourteenth century; the neumes of the late fourteenth-century fragments F 325 and F 361–362 were considered to be ‘direct antecedents’ to the neumes of the fragments. Transylvanian counterparts to the initials in the fragments with faces, head-pieces or monastic tonsures were identified.
The liturgical and melodic analyses of the chants in the fragments were accomplished by comparing them with manuscripts listed in Tables 4–5 (pp. 113–15) and Appendix 3 (p. 176). These analyses required consideration of the rites of three episcopal sees that met in the region of Transylvania, all dating from the eleventh century (see the two maps on pp. 174–5): that of Kalocsa-Bács was established after the archdiocese of Esztergom to cover Zagreb, Sirmium, Csanád and two other dioceses of the southeast border. This rite was reconstructed in Corpus Antiphonalium Officii–Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae, vols. VI-A–B: Kalocsa-Zagreb Temporale and Sanctorale, ed. Andrea Kovács (Budapest, 2008). The diocese of Transylvania had some 586 parishes, and that of Bihar/Várad some 300 parishes. The Várad rite was reconstructed and published in 2010. The diocesan boundaries did not prevent the movement of liturgical customs, however. For example, Várad and Erdely, which were suffragans of Kalocsa, developed variants distinct from the Kalocsa-Zagreb rite. Emphasised here is the inconsistent survival and loss of many sources, and idiosyncratic manuscripts that complicate study, such as the Codex Albensis, an early twelfth-century antiphoner that transmits an early Transylvanian rite with strong German influence but mistakes and misreadings, and the fifteenth-century Várad antiphoner prepared for its bishop by a Bohemian scribe and without signs of use. A psalter fragment in Nagyszeben and the Güssing fragments are the only surviving sources from before the fifteenth century that have melodies of their time. Sources of the mass were studied to evaluate the notation, but they proved not to be helpful.
When each office in the fragments was compared to a range of sources, they were shown to be most similar to different traditions, and in some offices one chant was closer to one tradition and another to a different one. For example, the Cecilia Office follows the order of the archdiocese of Kalocsa-Bács, but the ninth responsory verse of Matins in fragment 4/68 follows the Zagreb-Transylvanian liturgy. The Vespers antiphon for St Michael is closer to the liturgy of eastern Transylvania-Várad. An interesting argument is made that the responsory Vox tonitrui for St John the Evangelist, which is placed around 27 September, could reflect the influence of an orthodox Christian celebration of the ‘Repose for St John’ normally assigned to 26 September.
The office melodies are also aligned with different locations. The Catherine Office has some melodies differing from those of Esztergom and others matching the Szepes antiphoner. The chant Veniat dilectus meus in fragment 4/48 has the same melody and transposition as the Transylvania-Várad version, but most fragments have melodies differing from those of the Várad sources. Unexpected were melodic correspondences between the fragments and the Istanbul antiphoner of the thirteenth century, whose origin is not exactly known, and an Esztergom antiphoner of the fifteenth century. A unique curiosity noted here is the beginning of the antiphon Gloriosa Dei martyr of the office of St Catherine that is not found elsewhere in Europe but only in fragment 4/119. In short, the fragments are ‘the first sign of a colourful music tradition’ and do not correspond consistently to any known Hungarian or Transylvanian traditions. The state of research suggests that the inconsistencies may reflect an origin in one remote parish out of the hundreds in the three archdioceses from which no manuscripts survive. But could not the differences also pre-date the book-type called the breviary, when offices were transmitted in libelli with other hagiography?
The English translation of this volume is especially valuable, because it makes Hungarian approaches to problems of music palaeography available to a broader readership. Here, the meticulous analyses of the most minute details of each neume type revealed some of the scribe's reasons and strategies for reproducing singing as he did. This volume so rich in detail would nevertheless have benefited from an index of cited manuscripts and names.
The final book under consideration here, Gábriel Szoliva's edition of the Hymnuale ecclesiae Zagrabiensis, is a study and facsimile edition of two early fifteenth-century manuscript fragments originally from Zagreb: an Office of the Dead and a hymnal bound together as Zagreb, Metropolitan Library of the Archdiocese of Zagreb (Metropolitanska knjižnica zagrebačke nadbiskupije), HR 21. It includes an introduction summarising the state of research and a codicological description which discusses the problem of correcting the order of folios of the fragments, which was complicated because the two main gatherings are incomplete. There follow thorough studies of the Office of the Dead and the hymnal, the latter necessarily substantial and a model of its kind. These consider its structure, Zagreb-style chants, chants showing Cistercian or Dominican influence, the Common of Saints, other chants characteristic of the Zagreb tradition in later sources, and then the conclusions. The book ends with a bibliography, appendix comparing the liturgical order of MR 21 to the Esztergom tradition, indexes of cadences and chants, transcriptions of all the hymns with a detailed commentary on each, and a colour facsimile of the manuscript. The medieval liturgy of Zagreb was in use until 1788 and was reconstructed and edited in 2008 in the series CAO-ECE by Andrea Kovács.
The fragmentary notated Office of the Dead begins with the first antiphon of Matins, Dirige Domine Deus. The melodies are Zagreb melodies, but Hungarian variants were found in the verses to the Libera me responsory. Szoliva concluded that this is the oldest Office of the Dead to survive from Zagreb and of that use. The hymnal by the same scribe is also in gothica textualis with Bohemian notation, but the initials of the two fragments differ. Later scripts adding entries to the hymnal are identified, and palimpsest sections are precisely analysed. The manuscript represents the ‘Baroque’ state of a medieval choir psalter that was used by the cathedral chapter of Zagreb; the two surviving parts were detached, cropped and bound as independent books by the sixteenth century. Their comparison to inventories and manuscripts of the fifteenth century brought no match, but a possible supplement to MR 21 is the complete notated hymnal MR 4 in 1727. Revisions were made to the hymnal in the fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by cantors who scraped and replaced melodies.
The hymnal of MR 21 includes seventy hymns but has lacunae up to Corpus Christi and lacks the Dedication, but includes a fragmentary hymn for St George on 23 April, and complete hymns for Sts Peter and Paul, Anne and Michael, and the commune. The hymnal was compared with breviaries of the thirteenth century (MR 67) and of the fourteenth (MR 29), an intonarium for a bishop from 1466 to 1499 (MR 120), the hymnal MR 4, processionals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, printed breviaries of Zagreb of 1484 and 1678, and the hymnal of Humbert of Romans. This led to the conclusion that it was developed from an Esztergom base with Dominican influence (sometimes in the text only, sometimes music only and sometimes both) and later local adjustments. Cistercian influence is limited to the texts but some changes were made to the text-setting of the melodies. One early hymn melody is attested only in Zagreb. Fifteen melodies show complex Dominican influence, probably arising from the Dominican bishop from 1303 to 1322, Augustine Gazotti, who inspired a liturgical reform bringing Dominican elements especially after 1307/8. He introduced new feasts and an office following Dominican norms, and changes were made after his time. Two Cistercian texts are set to melodies probably from an Ambrosian model. In the commune, which is Zagrebian, each category of saints has two hymn melodies following a Dominican model.
The discussion of the numerous hymns of local importance is particularly fascinating. Some rubrics in the hymnal mention the churches in Zagreb. Also notable are the hymn that is a sequence-like trope, Quem non praevalent, the hymn that is a sequence, Cantemus cuncti, for the farewell to the Alleluia, and well-known hymns with variants or a new melody. Hymns for the Hours of Corpus Christi are those used in Esztergom and by Dominicans. A hymn for St Andrew, Exorta a Bethsaida, is contrafacted to the melody of Novum sidus emicuit from Esztergom for St Elizabeth. The unique text Psallamus hoc discipuli for Lauds of St Stephen also has an Esztergom melody. The Eastertide hymns are unique to Zagreb; the Ut queant laxis has a central European melody, and the hymns for King Ladislaus, Regis regum civis ave, and St Anne, Orbis exsultans celebret, show Cistercian influence and in this case are thought to be from an early fourteenth-century use. It is clear that these hymns, like the offices in the Güssing fragments, reflect the heterogeneous nature of the office, which is always susceptible to change as the liturgical calendar evolves over time.
The appendix has indexes of the Office of the Dead, which is compared with that of the Esztergom use, and of the hymnal and a list of chant. There follow full transcriptions of the notated hymns and the facsimile of MR 21. This model study of a hymnal, its repertory and its melodic variants cites the following manuscripts: Zagreb, Metropolitan Library of the Archdiocese of Zagreb, MR 2, 4, 10, 21, 29, 52, 67, 108, 120 and 191, and others not indexed (see the list of consulted manuscripts and published facsimiles of them, pp. 177–8).
