Untitled - Les chemins du Baroque

ThE ROSARY And ITS “MYSTERIES”
Recitation of the Rosary has long held
an important place in the expression of the devotion
of Catholic assemblies. Although it is generally asserted
that it was St Dominic who founded this pious
practice in the thirteenth century, it may have older
origins, since iconography from the eleventh century
onwards shows monks with chaplets in their hands
or hanging from their waist. The Feast of the Rosary
was instituted throughout Catholic Christendom by
Pope Pius V, in commemoration of the battle of
Lepanto, in which the fearsome Sultan Selim was
routed in October 1571. This explains why this form
of prayer was so popular in the seventeenth century
that Europe was soon full of “Confraternities of the
Holy Rosary” such as the one that had already long
existed in Salzburg at the period when Biber was
there, from 1670 until his death in 1704.
The rosary, rosarium in Latin, is originally a rose
garden. In the initial sense, each Ave Maria recited is
a rose plucked from the garden and offered to Mary.
In fact the rose, the flower most pregnant with symbolism
in the Western world (as is the lotus in the
East), with its concentric circular figures, embodies
perfection and quintessence: its calyx evokes the cup
of life, the receptacle, and its heart conjures up
dreams of paradisiacal love. From the rosa candida in
the highest circle of Dante's Paradise to the invocations
de García Lorca, the rose represents esotericism,
hidden meaning, mystery. Most allegorical,
mystical or alchemistic roses have seven petals symbolising
the whole of space and time, and the founders
of the Rosicrucian philosophy, like the craftsmen
of the Middle Ages, from miniaturists to
cathedral builders (think of the rose window!) gave
it a central position in their system of representation.
We are reminded by Davitt Moroney, in his
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remarkable analysis of Biber's cycle, that it is practically
impossible to understand the composer's musical
intentions without a preliminary examination of
the nature of the Rosary and the practices surrounding
it. For the believer it is essentially a meditation
on the “Mysteries” of the life of the Virgin Mary, of
which there are fifteen, here arranged in three
groups of five. The believer meditates on each mystery
whilst reciting, with the help of his chaplet, ten
Ave Marias preceded by a Pater Noster and followed
by a Gloria Patri. Each group evokes the contrasting
moments in the earthly and heavenly existence of
the Virgin. The first concerns the Joyful Mysteries:
the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Lord's Nativity,
the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and the
episode in which the boy Jesus is found in the
Temple. The following five Mysteries are those of
Sorrow: Christ's Agony in Gethsemane, the
Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying
of the Cross and the Crucifixion. The last five
Mysteries exalt the Resurrection, the Ascension, the
Descent of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost), the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Coronation in
heaven.
Yet are we really dealing with “sacred
music” here? If we take into account only the musical
language employed, which is the lingua franca of
chamber music of the time, then the answer is: certainly
not. Preludes, allemandes, courantes, gigues,
sarabandes and gavottes follow on from one another
without the appearance of anything having the
slightest connection with the forms of liturgical
music. But we are touching here on a problem that
will reappear a century later with Joseph Haydn's
Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (although it
is true that Haydn was referring to texts already
treated in a more orthodox manner by many other
composers before him, such as Heinrich Schütz): that