Cecilia and Me

Abstract

Cecilia and Me Richard Dale Sjoerdsma (bio) Editor's Commentary Hail, bright Cecilia! Born in Rome sometime during the second century, St. Cecilia was a young noblewoman and devout Christian whose early vow of chastity was threatened by a parentally arranged marriage to Valerian. "On her wedding night, rather than consummating the marriage, [Valerian] also became a Christian and joined her in a commitment to a celibate union."1 Since the practice of Christianity was strictly prohibited by the Roman emperor, Cecilia and Valerian, along with his brother Tiburtius, also a recent convert, suffered a gruesome martyrdom around 230 C.E. It was said that Cecilia miraculously survived a botched beheading three days before finally succumbing. Interestingly, details of Cecilia's life and death also are narrated and elaborated upon in "The Second Nun's Prologue" and "The Second Nun's Tale" from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.2 The Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, founded by Pope Urban in the third century, is believed to be where Cecilia lived and died, and where her remains were buried. As one of the most venerated martyrs of the early Christian church, St. Cecilia's feast day was celebrated in the Roman church already in the fourth century, falling on November 22 on the liturgical calendar. In the Sacramentarium Leoniam, a fifth century collection of masses, no fewer than five different masses are found in her honor.3 Lacking empirical historical evidence, Cecilia's identification as patroness of music and musicians is tenuous at best. As narratives recounting her marriage ceremony and brief life expanded, musical associations gained prominence, especially in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, leading to Cecilian festivals and a late nineteenth century movement in Germany (Caecelianismus) for the reform of Catholic church music.4 Cecilia is richly represented in paintings as early as the sixth century in Ravenna and Croatia,5 but also in later Medieval and Renaissance art (e.g., Rubens, Raphael, Dolci, Reni, Cortina, Cavallino, Sarcceni), typically with or even sometimes playing the organ. One explanation for the close association of St. Cecilia with music may be found in the Acts of St. Cecilia, a document dating from about 500 C.E. In its narrating of the wedding, the Acts contains much of the text of the antiphon cited below, which may account for her subsequent role as patroness of music.6 That Cecilia's identification with music has been secure for centuries and remains so today is documented in the music canon itself. Along with other examples, the Liber Usualis shows an early antiphon for Second Vespers of her feast day that at least partially suggests Cecilia's identification with music, specifically alluding to mystical happenings on the occasion of her wedding to Valerian (Example 1).7 [End Page 155] One of the more familiar musical tributes is Henry Purcell's Ode to St. Cecilia (1692), a work with which I became acquainted while singing in a Collegium Musicum ensemble during my doctoral studies at The Ohio State University. With a libretto by the little known Nicholas Brady, the cantata for chorus, solo voices, and orchestra opens with a florid greeting in recitative for bass solo (Example 2). Later in the work, as homage to the instrument with which Cecilia is most clearly associated, appears the bass aria, "Wondrous Machine," with a characteristic Purcellian ground bass (Example 3). A number of other Cecilian compositions of British origin—John Blow, Daniel Purcell, William Boyce, among others—lead to Handel. His oratorio Alexander's Feast and Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, the latter a setting of John Dryden's poem and the former an adaptation of it by Newburgh Hamilton, remain staple repertoire items today. Cecilian masses by A. Scarlatti, Haydn, Gounod, and others, are not so much direct tributes as relatively standard mass forms perhaps to be performed on her feast day. More recent examples include: "A Hymn for St. Cecilia," by Herbert Howells to poetry by Ursula Vaughan Williams (wife of the famous composer); Gerald Finzi's For St. Cecilia, Op. 30, a "ceremonial ode" for tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra, to words by Edmund Blunden; a song, "Ode on the Rejection...