Plainchant in nineteenth-century England: a review of some major publications of the period

Abstract

The history of plainchant in the nineteenth century is dominated by the various attempts at scholarly restoration both in Britain and abroad. Up to the middle part of the century these efforts were concentrated in France, although demands for revival were being voiced in Italy by Pietro Alfieri, and in Germany by Franz Xaver Witt, amongst others. The first scholarly attempt at the restoration of plainchant was made in 1846 as a result of Jean-Louis-Félix Danjou's discovery of the eleventh-century tonary of St Bénigne de Dijon. Like the Rosetta stone, it enabled scholars to decipher the meaning of symbols which had previously eluded them. In this case the manuscript is notated with both neumes and alphabetic script, so that for the first time the melodic ductus of ancient neumes could be interpreted with certainty. This manuscript became the source for the Rheims-Cambrai Graduale Romanum complectens missas, printed in Paris in 1851, later to be published under the auspices of Cardinal Sterckx of Mechelen and edited by Duval and Bogaerts. Despite the quality of the Mechlin Graduale, it did not fail to cause immense controversy. Louis Vitet, for example, ‘was astonished that a group of four notes in the Paris gradual of 1826 should be replaced in the Rheims-Cambrai edition with a melisma of 48 notes’. Other efforts at revival were equally plagued by controversy. Lambillotte's facsimile edition of St Gall 359, published, in 1851, proved to be ‘completely unreliable’, and the 1857 Parisian Graduale romanum upon which it is based ‘contained truncated melodies’.