Thomas Tallis - Dum transisset Sabbatum
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
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Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) was an English Renaissance composer who occupies a primary place in anthologies of English choral music. He is considered one of England's greatest composers, and he is honoured for his original voice in English musicianship.
"Dum transisset Sabbatum" is a motet for 5 voices, inspired from Mark 16:1-2, composed by Thomas Tallis and first published in 1575 in "Cantiones sacrae".
Dum transisset Sabbatum (Original Latin)
Dum transisset Sabbatum,
Maria Magdalene et Maria Jacobi
et Salome emerunt aromata,
ut venientes ungerent Jesum. Alleluia.
Et valde mane una Sabbatorum
veniunt ad monumentum,
orto iam sole.
Ut venientes ungerent Jesum. Alleluia.
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto.
Alleluia.
Dum transisset Sabbatum (Translate)
When the sabbath was over,
Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James,
and Salome bought aromatic oils,
intending to go and anoint Jesus. Alleluia.
And very early on the first day of the week,
they came to the tomb,
just after sunrise.
Intending to go and anoint Jesus. Alleluia.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
Alleluia.
Performers:
- The Cardinall's Musick
- Andrew Carwood (Conductor)
See also:
ruclips.net/video/r-NkLPya7UY/видео.html
Thomas Tallis - Ave Dei patris filia
Also so beautiful. Thank you, Magnificat.
How blessed are we to have such gifted writers as Anthony Esolen! How glorious is this work of Thomas Tallis 🙏
Add my name to the list of folks who looked for this because of reading Anthony Esolen's article in the April 2023 issue of Magnificat Magazine. Magnificent!
Me too! Sitting in tears, listening, preparing for Sunday Mass.
I found reference to this in the April 2023 issue of Magnificat, a Catholic monthly devotional. So beautiful
Same here. This is the frist version I've listened to. Are there any other notable versions you've found?
I, too, just read Anthony Esolen's peice in the April 2023 Magnificat. Never heard this beautiful music priot to thios morning before mass.
#metoo! I want to hear a version such as he described, with boy sopranos singing the first words.
Alleluia!
"The Poetry of Praise" by Anthony Esolen in the April 2023 "Magnificat" 📕
The Haunting of the Sun 🌞
Many of us in our time don’t see the sun rising 🌅, because we do not have to be up and about to tend the animals 👨🌾, and in general our work is indoors. That, I think, is much to our loss, because the great massive fact of the natural world, in its beauty, its power, and its indifference to our fantasies, keeps the imagination from growing sickly. For as far as that world alone is concerned, there will come a morning for each of us, bright or dim as it may be, that will be our last.
So I think of that mysterious morning when, as Saint Mark tells us, the holy women brought spices to anoint Jesus, and they came to the tomb, after the sun had risen. They must have been in low spirits, dwelling upon their sorrow, because they did not consider, until they got near, how they would roll the stone back from the tomb. We know what they will find, but they do not, and our knowledge causes us to want to sing with a kind of anticipatory gladness, even before we hear or say the words “He is risen.”
The dawn-song
When the first Christian monks came to England 🏴 to evangelize the Saxons, they did not use a lot of Latin terms to describe what they were doing. Instead, they gave us powerfully suggestive words in the native tongue, words that help us see or hear or touch what they name. For example, when those monks got up while it was still twilight in the sky, they did not sing “matins,” from the Latin word for morning, but the uht-sang, the dawn-song. And could there be a more moving dawn-song than what you might sing on Easter?
Here are the antiphons for the third responsory, for the Easter dawn-song. I’ll give them in Latin first, then in English, and I’ll separate them into verse and response:
🇻🇦 LATIN
"Dum transisset sabbatum, Maria Magdalene, et Maria Iacobi, et Salome emerunt aromata ut venientes ungerent Iesum, alleluia, alleluia.
Et valde mane una sabbatorum, veniunt ad monumentum, orto iam sole.
Ut venientes ungerent Iesum, alleluia, alleluia.
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, alleluia, alleluia."
🇬🇧 ENGLISH
"When the Sabbath had passed, Mary Magdalen, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, to go and anoint Jesus, alleluia, alleluia.
And indeed on the morning of the first day of the week they came to the tomb, the sun having already risen, to go and anoint Jesus, alleluia, alleluia.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, alleluia, alleluia."
There’s something about the repetition of Scripture in the divine office that I find deeply moving. You don’t just say the verse. You respond to it, you repeat it in part, you respond again, and here, for the great feast of Easter, you respond with alleluias, and that is also how you end that tremendous prayer of praise to the Trinity-alleluia, alleluia!
The music of joy
How do you then set this prayer to music? 🙏 🗣🎼 🎶
We live in a strangely joyless time. We have not the old pagan gods of earth and sky, and hearth and home, to thrill us with fear, or to rouse our hearts to praise. Christ has harrowed hell, and the pagan gods are but names for us, or literary characters. No Greek 🇬🇷 boy need fear to find Artemis hunting in the forest. The River Ilissus where Socrates and Phaedrus discoursed about love is now a ditch running underneath the city of Athens. We sing to God, or we will sooner or later not sing at all.
As singing is more than noise, so joy is more than excitement. It is the sister of solemnity, because it springs from the depths of our being. If you want, then, to sing about the holy women going to the tomb, anticipating what they will find but still shrouding them in the mystery of that morning, you must bring that solemnity to the fore, as it is breaking forth into bright day. And that’s what the great English composer Thomas Tallis († 1585) has done, in his brilliant polyphonic motet. You may find it under the first two words, which a boy soprano will chant solo: Dum transisset. And I recommend that you do find it sung by a choir of men and boys, since that is what Tallis heard in his mind’s ear when he composed it, and in the ear of his flesh when he himself directed the choir in the Chapel Royal, in London.
The usual thing for such a prayer is to have a tenor chant out the opening words, while the whole choir sings the response. But here, Tallis directs a child to do so. What’s in play here is more than the high register of the soprano. It is also the very youthfulness. The sound is fresh and pure, and it betokens innocence. Here, at the daybreak of the risen Son, let the grown sinner be led by the child.
Soaring, without strain
Tallis was an old man in 1575 when he first published this work, set for five (or six) voices. If you have never heard polyphonic music, you are like someone who has, let’s say, never seen a rose window in a medieval cathedral ⛪. The very kind of art will be new to you. For the voices do not sing the words in unison, or in harmony, simultaneously. In Dum transisset, you have five separate melodies going on at the same time, weaving in and out of one another, with the singers usually not singing the same syllables or even the same words at the same time, though they are all brought into harmony at the end of a verse. Your ear will have to do what your eye does when you gaze at a rose window: not to go from note to note, but to hear whole melodies simultaneously.
It takes practice, no doubt. But here Tallis will give you considerable help. For he does something quite unusual with the soprano part, sung by the boys. They soar. They sing only whole notes, single or tied-as if the entire piece depends on what they are establishing firmly in the heights. You have to dig a deep foundation in the earth ⛏ if you are going to build a cathedral of wood and stone. For this cathedral of song, Tallis has laid his foundation in the sky. It is the men in their four subordinate parts, not the boys, who sing their lilting strands of melody, their runs of happy notes falling and rising, their surprising sharps # that move the melody into a new key. They are the adornment. The heights are the firm reality.
When you hear it, you will know what I am talking about. While the boys are singing alleluia, alleluia, just twice, and with great spirit, the second altos, the tenors, and the basses are singing the word twelve times, and the first altos nine times, in a staggering variety of melodies. And Tallis makes it even easier for us to hear the sopranos as the leaders, because their melody is simple and solemn, never rising or falling more than two notes at a time.
Let us go to the place of repose
There was an old custom that Catholics in the Middle Ages followed on Easter morning, which would have been perfect for Tallis’ music, though by his time in English cathedrals the custom had probably been discarded. The great Benedictine monk and historian Prosper Guéranger describes it in The Liturgical Year. After the third lesson of Easter matins, but before they break out into the glorious Ambrosian hymn, the Te Deum, all the cathedral clergy proceed in solemnity to the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament ✝ 🍞 has been in repose since Holy Thursday, and which hence was called the Chapel of the Sepulcher. Among them are three who are vested in albs-we might call them the Dawn-Robes-and who represent the three holy women. When they enter the chapel, two deacons clad in white, one at the head of the tomb and one at the foot, address them, saying, “What do you seek in the tomb, O friends of Christ?”
The priests, in the persons of the women, reply, “Jesus of Nazareth, O ye inhabitants of the heavens!” To which the deacons reply, “He is no longer here. He is risen, as he foretold. Go and announce that he is living!” Then the priests mount to the altar, lift the cloth upon it, and kiss the stone. Having done so, they turn about and sing to the bishop and the clergy, “Alleluia! Today the Lord is risen, the strong Lion 🦁 is risen, the Christ, the Son of God!”
Imagine that! The tomb becomes a tabernacle. The altar of sacrifice becomes the cornerstone of the new Temple. What became of the oils and the spices that the women were bringing to anoint the body of Jesus? They are here in the Church still, the oil that makes the new Christian, the spices of worship that send their fragrance up to God.
Tallis would understand it. Let us try our best to do so too.
.
Anthony Esolen is professor 👨🏫 and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House), and author of three volumes of essays, How the Church Has Changed the World (Magnificat).
Me too!
I too found this through the Magnificat. Listening to this just as the sun is rising as I prepare to go to early morning Mass. It's perfect to start the day off.
Magnificat magnificent. Guide us Lord to worship you in love...
Me too, Magnificat. Beautiful motet.
I too searched for this music after reading about in the April 2023 issue of Magnificat in an article by Anthony Esolen.
Same here!
Beautiful. Found from Magnificat April article.
Me too!
So did I!
Likewise!
I also saw it in the April issue of the Magnicat🎶
Fabulous way to prepare for worship. Thank you Magnificat
I came here too because of Magnificat!😊
Yes, Tallis cuts the soul. This morning, on the way to St. James Cathedral in Seattle (beautiful novis ordo liturgy in the traditional mold - live streamed at 8 and 10, with a tremendously gifted pastor and homilist), I was privileged to listen to the work of another great Renaissance composer, the Spaniard Tomas Luis de Victoria, Missa Dum Complerentur. Just magnificent. Classical channel King FM98.1 carries sacred music every Sunday morning. I listen on the drive in from West Seattle and am truly disposed properly to participate in the sacred liturgy. Highly recommend the music and the livestream (especially the 10 with the Cathedral Choir). He is risen!
Love that Magnificat brought us all here! I was so fascinated by the description of the music that I had to hear it. This version is lovely, but I really want to hear the boy soprano as described. I did find this, version but the voice sounds more like a woman's. ruclips.net/video/VNliSgTn6gw/видео.html
If anyone finds something closer to the description, please post @
Same here!
Me also
Me too!!
And me ❤
So beautiful.
Me too!