In the modern three-year Sunday Eucharistic lectionary, the Gospels on this Fourth Sunday of Advent are the accounts of the Annunciation and Visitation of the BVM, and the Annunciation to St Joseph in a dream. The two former passages, coming as they do from the early part of St Luke’s Gospel, are awash with song: the Visitation, read this year, is the source both of part of the Ave Maria and of the Magnificat.
Settings of these two great prophetic songs – sung, characteristically for Luke, by persons thought in that day and, too often, in ours, to be of lesser value, viz., an older woman who had struggled with infertility, and an unwed teenaged mother* – are sung by the choir. A brisk Magnificat by 20th-century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams alternates between busily moving and more expansive passages but is united by a flowing, perhaps chant-like, melody in something like speech rhythm. A short but compositionally complex setting of the part of the Ave Maria that comes from today’s Gospel – ‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ – is sung at Communion. This anthem is a double inversion canon: one single melodic line is sung in canon (like a round) in two voices, while the upside-down version of this same melody is also sung in canon in two voices, all at once! (Perhaps we can think of the many inversions of status described in the Magnificat.) The composer, Francesc Valls, worked in Catalunya from the late 17th to the mid-18th century and wrote a treatise upon learned counterpoint, from which this piece is taken.
Our Communion hymn, ‘Ye who claim the faith of Jesus’ [268/269], speaks of the Blessed Virgin’s role in the Incarnation, drawing some wording from the Collect for the Feast of the Visitation. The Hymnal text concludes with a one-stanza summary of the Magnificat; the version printed at 269 includes the refrain ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’, while that at 268 omits this but instead sets the first line of the Latin text as a descant. Since this parish does not know either of the tunes printed with this hymn, we sing it to ‘Divinum mysterium’, associated with the great Christmas hymn ‘Of the Father’s love begotten’ [82], which allows the singing of the ‘Hail, Mary’ refrain.
Finally, our series of organ preludes based on the hymn-tunes forming the basis of our Advent service music concludes with three short settings each of ‘Conditor alme siderum’ (9:00) and ‘Veni redemptor gentium’ (11:15). The former are the work of Louis Couperin, whose entire output for the organ, written in the 1650s, was rediscovered in the 1950s but not published until about 25 years ago. The first two settings feature the hymn-tune in the middle of three musical lines, lightly decorated so as to participate in the texture established by the outer voices. In the third verse, also in three voices, the hymn-tune is more elaborately decorated but found in both of two equal upper voices above a simple bass line. The settings of ‘Veni redemptor’ were written by Georg Friedrich Kauffmann, a contemporary of Bach. Two of them are written in three voices in a lively 6/8 meter, with the melody in the lower and upper voices, respectively; the other, in common time, is a short but densely textured and harmonically rich four-voice fugue based on the first phrase of the melody. We close the service and the season with the singing of this hymn, ‘Savior of the nations, come’ [54].
*for an Old Testment passage parallelling the life circumstance of the one and the song of the other, see story of Hannah, mother of Samuel [I Sameul 1.4–20], which we read not many weeks ago.
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