Mozarabic chant in deepest Suffolk Sacred Mysteries

Article written by  Christopher Howse of the Daily Telegraph. For link to original article, click here.

Bury St Edmunds finished its Gothic cathedral only 10 years ago. Its choir keeps up a centuries-old tradition.

I found myself in St Edmundsbury Cathedral last week just before they were to sing Evensong. So I stayed, and I’m glad I did.

Apart from anything else, a good way to appreciate a building is to see it put to the use it was designed for. As the church of St James, it was completed at the beginning of the 16th century by John Wastell, the designer of Bell Harry, the great tower of Canterbury Cathedral. As the cathedral of the diocese centred on Bury St Edmunds, it was not finished until 2005.

Its completion was thanks to Stephen Dykes Bower, the architect who had given St Paul’s Cathedral in London a baldacchino over the high altar that most tourists take to be the work of Wren himself. Dykes Bower designed for St James’s a choir in place of the chancel built by George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s. On his death in 1994 Dykes Bower left a couple of million towards the completion of the central tower, which is reminiscent of Bell Harry, as noted by James Bettley the author of the new Pevsner volumes for Suffolk to be published in April. To me it looks good externally, from the town (pictured) or abbey ruins, and internally it accentuates the soaring impetus of Wastell’s tall nave and the sparely decorated piers and walls of the choir.

In its stalls a choir of boys and singing men sang a very Anglican service for the dozen regulars sitting beside them. I suppose the service was for God really, and the regulars were listening in and saying their prayers. The liturgy was Book of Common Prayer, with Psalm 50 in Coverdale’s precise language made exotic by antiquity: “For all the beasts of the forest are mine: and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills.” To Orlando Gibbons’s music they sang a motet by the curiously minded Phineas Fletcher: “Drop, drop, slow tears, / And bathe those beauteous feet / Which brought from Heaven / The news and Prince of Peace.”

I doubt that even Fletcher, for all his learning, would have known the recessional chant, with which most churchgoers are now familiar under the title “Lent Prose”. It has the refrain, “Hearken, O Lord, have mercy upon us, / For we have sinned against thee.” The refrain is often sung in its original Latin, which is quite easy for the congregation to pick up: Attende, Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi.

The standard C of E translation is by C S Phillips – not a very widely known name, but a contributor to the Plainchant Hymnbook of 1932, promoted by Hymns Ancient & Modern. Phillips’s version was broadcast in the BBC radio prime-time Good Friday service of 1934.

When most people see in their hymnbook that Attende, Domine is “Mozarabic, 10th century”, I think they leave it at that. To be precise, it is from the Preces at the short office of Sext on the Thursday after Passion Sunday in the Mozarabic breviary. The Mozarabs, it is worth saying, did not use Arabic in their liturgy but, as the Christians living under Arab rule in Spain, used Latin, like the rest of the Western Church from Ireland to Milan. The enlightened antiquarianism of the Renaissance Cardinal Ximenes and his successors preserved its use in Toledo.

But the refrain of the hymn is not Mozarabic at all. It was spliced on by the scholar of Gregorian chant, Dom Joseph Pothier (1835-1923). He had joined the abbey of Solesmes under the great Dom Prosper Guéranger. Their life’s work was to refound the monastic life that the Revolution had extirpated in France, and to revive Gregorian chant for the whole Church. In 1901, the French again banned monks, so Solesmes took refuge on the Isle of Wight.

By this roundabout route we are left with Attende, Domine, the tune taken, like the refrain, from a Paris Processionale of 1834, but of earlier origin. Its medieval Latin poetry is miraculously effective: Dextera Patris, lapis angularis, via salutis, janua caelestis – “Right hand of the Father, cornerstone, way of salvation, gate of heaven, wash away the stain of our offences.” Just right for Lent in Bury St Edmunds.