Dramatic Expression in Office and Play

Medieval literature is full of tales in which miraculous goings-on coincide with the audition or performance of song. Precedents go back to antiquity and the Bible, yet from the moment that Romano-Frankish chant was established as the musical _lingua franca_ of Western Christendom, in the ninth century, many authors began to weave their tales around named or otherwise readily identifiable compositions. Very often the text of the chant can explain (away) the allusion. Equally, as Christopher Page has pointed out, music that was liturgically positioned had a unique propensity to serve as a "coordinate" in the collective memory of an event (2010, 2016).


However, closer examination of these stories reveals that some musical scenarios were more highly favoured than others, suggesting that that there is more to these citations than meets the eye. Liturgically-inclined scholars have already observed as much, albeit obliquely. Writing about the visionary Elisabeth of Schönau, Felix Heinzer noted the potential for vision narratives to be aligned with "dramatically accentuated moments" of the liturgy, in which category he included the dramatic unfolding of the responsory chant (2013). Meanwhile, Éric Palazzo has noted how liturgically-induced visions tended to cluster at night, during the musically-intense night office of matins (2010).


In this paper I draw these strands together by exploring a significant, yet hitherto unnoticed, concentration of miracle stories that coincide with matins responsories, specifically the extended responsory performances that marked the ends of nocturns. Whilst many of these narratives appear to reference wordless _neuma_ melodies, famously allegorised by Amalarius of Metz as marking a threshold between human and divine, this is not the common theme. Rather, the unifying strand is the concept of the threshold. Experienced ritually yet understood eschatologically, the notion of "crossing over" was articulated simultaneously by the ritual action, by the musical content, and by the layered narratives of chant texts, liturgical texts, and hagiography. Amongst the implications of these observations are fresh insights into the design of chants in saints' _historiae_, as well as a reconsideration of _neumatizing_ and _polyphonizing_ as performance practices within the medieval Divine Office.

When set beside the office liturgy for the feast of the Holy Innocents, the Innocents' play in Orléans Bibliothèque municipale 201 is striking: while it takes over much from the standard liturgy in direct or indirect form, its design apportions space for the expression of diverse voices in a completely different way. In the responsories for the night office it is the exegetical understanding of the children massacred by Herod's order which dominates: taken, with only one exception, from Revelation chapters 6 and 14, their texts tell of the fate of these martyred souls, and call for vengeance. It is just that one exception, the responsory _Vox in Rama_ (Matt. 2.18) which links the night office to the moment in the life of Christ when he escaped Herod's massacre. In contrast, the Innocents' play gives almost a half of its span to Rachel's lament and attempts by others to console her. This lament is set within other frames – exegetical (the martyrs of Revelation, see Boynton 1998) and narrative (the journey of Joseph and family) – but it is Rachel's suffering which is emphasized, through narrative design, and textual and musical techniques. Even the closing _Te deum laudamus_ could hardly wash away the pathos of Rachel's anguish, heard in new sounds which could catch the ear in a way that the familiar, rejoicing _Te deum_ might not.


The expression of voices, single or in dialogue, was not absent from Gregorian chant: 
responsories of the office included many such historical "voicing" chants, both for single voices, and in two or more in dialogue. Such chants could bring intensity to the moment of their delivery, using melody to articulate their texts in specific ways: in this sense, dramatic expression has very deep liturgical roots. But new dramatic composition was at once freer than the established liturgy, less tied to tradition, more flexible, and thus able to provide a space for local expression and creativity. Unlike the office liturgy for the Innocents' feast, the play preserved in Orléans 201 draws attention to the grief of parents who have lost their children, sometimes through appalling massacre.

The medieval Mary Magdalene was a complex amalgamation created from various passages of scripture. In the course of the eleventh century this character grew beyond the sermons of Gregory the Great and early _vitae_ through the development of full-blown proper offices for the celebration of her major feast on July 22. Regional differences between these various liturgical materials were first laid out by Victor Saxer in his classic study _Le Culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident_ (1959). David Hiley (2004) identified the major families of chants in the varied Magdalene offices, mostly works composed before the middle of the twelfth century. 


My study first outlines two strains of the Magdalene office, one found in a twelfth-century breviary from the Benedictine monastery of Fontevraud, and the other from the thirteenth century at Klosterneuberg. Using these very different Magdalene offices for context, I then turn to Magdalene's character as found in three plays. The earlier two are Lazarus plays, one attributed to Abelard's student Hilarius, and the other as found in Orléans Bibliothèque municipale 201, the so-called Fleury playbook. The third is as found in the early thirteenth-century compilation Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 4660 (_Carmina Burana_). When themes and topics represented in the offices and their arrangements are compared with those of the plays, vast differences emerge in the ways the distinct genres manipulate the unfolding of time to create character. But the Magdalene of the offices does not evolve to a significant degree in the later Middle Ages. The situation is completely different in the plays. In the Hilarius play, a penitent emphasis is absent. In the play from Orléans 201, a new scene at the opening introduces Mary, the sinner. In the south German/Austrian play, Magdalene is a prostitute, with many details of her sinful life on display. The counterpoint between the Mary of the offices and the Mary of the plays creates a rich commerce of exchange, but it is the plays that represent a major turning point in the development of Magdalene's cult.