O
O ANTIPHONS
. These antiphons, sung with the Magni-ficat at First Vespers on the days preceding
Christmas, are so named because they all begin with the exclamation “O.” In the Middle
Ages, they were sometimes known as the “great antiphons” (antiphonae maiores). The
texts, charged with Old Testament messianic symbolism, begin with a divine epithet that
is elaborated by subsequent phrases and end with an invitation beginning veni (“come”).
The coherence of the basic group of seven found in medieval antiphoners (O sapientia, O
adonai, O radix jesse, O clavis David, O oriens, O rex gentium, O Emmanuel) is attested
by the acrostic formed by the first letters of the divine epithets read in reverse: ERO
CRAS (“I will be [here] tomorrow”). All of the texts are sung to a solemn melody in the
second mode, which is not used outside this group. The number of O antiphons grew to
as many as twelve in some sources, with the addition of other texts (O virgo virginum, O
Thoma Didyme) to the original seven. The starting date of the cycle, which had to
conclude on De-cember 23, depended on the number of antiphons traditional in a
particular locale.
A 7th-century Roman origin has been proposed by Callewaert, who traces their
dissemination through England to the Continent. The Venerable Bede (d. 735) is said to
have sung the antiphon O rex gloriae, a piece modeled after the O antiphons of Advent,
on his deathbed, and in the late 8th century the English poet Cynewulf paraphrased the
antiphons in The Christ. Alcuin (d. 804) lists ten O antiphons in his De laude Dei.
Amalarius of Metz devoted a chapter of De ordine antiphonarii (837) to a discussion of
these antiphons, but neither his ordering of the chants nor that of other French sources
conforms to the arrangement suggested by the acrostic. Since Amalarius’s antiphoner has
been lost, the antiphoner of Compiègne (B.N. lat 17436), from the last third of the 9th
century, represents the first appearance of the O antiphons in a liturgical book. Here, as
elsewhere, they are entered as a group, not distributed according to the days on which
they were to be sung.
These antiphons drew the attention of several medieval commentators on the liturgy
(Berno, Jean Beleth, Honorius of Autun, Guillaume Durand, Reinerius of Liège), and
their solemn singing at the close of Advent broke to a certain degree with the penitential
character of the season. The honor of intoning them before the Magnificat was reserved
to dignitaries of the monastery or cathedral chap-ter. At Fleury, O clavis was assigned to
the cellarer; at Rouen, it fell just as appropriately to the cathedral treasurer. In some
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1276