A Latin liturgical chant repertory from southern Italy, in use from the 7th century until the 11th, when it was suppressed. Independent in many respects of parallel developments in the Roman Church, the Beneventan chant is characterized by a formulaic and rather ornate musical style, by a tonality not dependent on a system of eight modes, and by the use of non-standard and non-biblical texts. The term ‘Beneventan’ is used in the literature to refer to the city of Benevento, to the area of southern Italy in which the characteristic Beneventan script was practised, or to things generally associated with this area. Thus the versions of Franco-Roman chant and the tropes and sequences composed and used there have also often been called ‘Beneventan’; this article is concerned only with the early Beneventan liturgy and its music.
A Latin liturgy had certainly existed in southern Italy before the Lombard invasions of the 6th century, and some of the liturgical anomalies of books such as I-BV 33, a 10th-century missal of the Roman rite, may be remnants of what some have called an earlier ‘Campanian’ liturgy. Centred on the city of Benevento, the Beneventan rite and its chant developed during the 7th and 8th centuries when Lombard power was at its height. It includes music for St Barbatus (bishop); for the apparition of St Michael on Monte Gargano, a feast and a shrine particularly dear to the Lombards and Beneventans; and for the Holy Twelve Brothers of Benevento, whose remains were interred by Duke Arichis II in his palace church of Santa Sofia in 760.
The Beneventan chant bears many relationships to the northern, Ambrosian (Milanese) chant; both were liturgical repertories of regions dominated by the Lombards, and Ambrose has been claimed as the ancestor of the two rites. The Beneventan chant was, in fact, called ‘cantus ambrosianus’ by its scribes, thereby acknowledging a Lombard link. Musical similarities, too, suggest that the Lombards once shared a liturgy, but as a result of geographical and political separation, particularly after the fall of the Lombard kingdom of Pavia to Charlemagne in 774, each region gradually developed its own tradition.
By the 8th century, however, the Gregorian chant must already have been in place in southern Italy, to judge from archaic features in Gregorian books from this region. Beneventan and Roman chants may have co-existed in the Beneventan zone for a time: a rubric in I-Rvat Ottob.145 states, ‘Quando non canimus ipse ant. secundum romano. quo modo supra scripte sunt canimus secundum Ambro[sianum] hoc modo’ (‘when we do not sing these antiphons according to the Roman [rite, liturgy] as they are written above, we sing them according to the Ambrosian [i.e. Beneventan], as follows’; perhaps the Beneventan chant persisted among those who felt a long loyalty to Lombard heritage. The growing pre-eminence of the Roman chant can be traced through the saints of Benevento: the Twelve Brothers, celebrated from 760, have a Beneventan Mass; St Mercurius, whose relics were brought to Benevento in 768, has none. In 838 the relics of the apostle St Bartholomew were brought to Benevento, but the Mass for St Bartholomew, unique to manuscripts of the Beneventan zone, is in Gregorian style. The chronicle of Monte Cassino reports that in 1058 Pope Stephen IX strictly forbade the singing of ‘Ambrosian’ chant there: ‘Tunc etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista penitus interdixit’.
As a result of the deliberate suppression of the Beneventan chant, what remains of the repertory survives in some 90 manuscript sources from the late 10th century onwards – palimpsests and fragments from complete books containing mostly doublets, appendixes, and supernumerary additions in manuscripts of the Gregorian chant, the repertory that ultimately replaced the Beneventan. Two south-Italian missals of the late 10th century, I-Rvat 10673 and BV 33 (PalMus, xiv and xx respectively), include among their Franco-Roman liturgy a substantial portion of the Beneventan Holy Week liturgy. Three manuscript graduals from Benevento Cathedral contain almost all the surviving Beneventan chants for the Mass: BV 38 and 40 (11th century) include an annual cycle of masses in Gregorian chant together with a repertory of tropes and sequences, but they also contain 19 doublet masses in Beneventan chant along with special Beneventan music for Holy Week; the final fly-leaf of BV 35 (12th century) from an 11th-century Beneventan Mass book contains the end of the Christmas Mass and the beginning of that for St Stephen. These 11th-century sources are notated in clefless neumes with only approximate diastematy (see illustration); however, careful analysis of comparable melodies and formulae results in mostly reliable transcriptions.
Also among the sources are the 25 magnificent Exultet rolls of southern Italy, which were used in important monasteries and cathedrals for the blessing of the Paschal candle during the Easter Vigil service. Such rolls, when they contain the special Beneventan text of the Exultet, or the Beneventan melody that persisited long after most churches had converted to the imported Franco-Roman text, testify to the extent and influence of the Beneventan ritual.
Sources of the Beneventan liturgy are incomplete, since no sacramentary, missal, lectionary or antiphoner has survived. Although music exists for most of the principal feasts, there is little evidence that the Beneventan rite included a specific set of chants for every Sunday of the year as in the fully developed Roman calendar. Non-biblical texts and texts that rearrange biblical phrases and ideas occur frequently; such a variety of texts recalls the Milanese rite with its similar range of textual sources and suggests parallels with the poetry of the Byzantine Church. Some Beneventan texts have parallels at Milan or in the Greek rite, but most do not.
The chants of the Beneventan Mass always number at least four: ingressa, alleluia, offertory and communion; sometimes a gradual is also present. Ordinary chants are rare in the surviving sources, but the Creed was frequently present in the Mass (a Lombard symptom, perhaps, from a time when orthodoxy was not taken for granted); a single threefold Kyrie was sung after the Gloria (as in the Milanese rite). The ingressae, sung without psalmody as at Milan, are among the most elaborate chants. Graduals are included in only six Beneventan masses, each consisting of a single verse with a partial repetition of the opening portion sometimes indicated. All surviving masses except those for Holy Week have alleluias, most of them sung to the same melody; another melody was used for St Stephen and maybe for other saints; a third melody was sung on Holy Saturday and was adapted, perhaps at a later stage, to other texts for Christmas, St Peter, the Transfiguration and (in the Old Roman gradual CH-CObodmer 74 only) the Epiphany. Offertories and communions are present for each Mass and are usually relatively simple antiphons (although the Easter communion is exceptionally elaborate). Many masses have two communions, recalling the Milanese confractorium and transitorium. Some communions are found elsewhere as offertories or as antiphons.
It is possible that the Beneventan Mass never had, and was never intended to have, the fixity that has come to be associated with the Roman Mass. A number of Beneventan chants serve multiple functions: pieces may appear as antiphons, as offertories or as communions. In addition, there are many places where sources do not agree about the piece to be assigned to a certain function in the Mass, particularly in the case of offertories and communions. This may indicate that the preservation of Beneventan chant in a Gregorian format, which requires a fixed chant for every liturgical function, has misrepresented the less fixed, more flexible nature of the Beneventan repertory.
The unique Beneventan Holy Week rites are especially well documented; they are given with full rubrics, beginning with sources from the late 10th century. Elements of these Holy Week practices, which have survived for far longer than anything else in the Beneventan rite, are found in many sources in which no other Beneventan music has been retained. Music for three Vespers services (Good Friday, St John the Baptist and Epiphany) has also survived, and a few groups of antiphons in Beneventan style have been assimilated into Gregorian books for the Offices of regional saints. There are a small number of antiphons among the pieces for rogations, and a pair of pieces for the Purification, whose style seems decidedly Beneventan even though there is nothing in their transmission to suggest that the scribe knew of their Beneventan origin.
Beneventan chant is uniform in style, proceeding at a regular, rather ornate pace using mostly stepwise intervals. Throughout the chant are small melodic formulae which are repeated far more often than are their counterparts in other chant dialects. Few stylistic distinctions can be made in the repertory on the basis of liturgical function or modal category, or between music for the choir and music for the cantor. The tonal range is limited. There is no evidence that the Beneventan chant was ever subject to the effects of the eight-mode system of organization that affects much medieval music. Almost every piece ends on one of two notes (A or G), no special characteristics being specific to either group. Some larger pieces, notably the ingressae, are made up from many repetitions of a single long phrase.
The Beneventan communion for the feast of the apparition of St Michael (ex.1), a piece of very modest proportions, shows some typical features of the chant: recitations on a repeating podatus (‘Multos infirmos’) or on a rising three-note figure (‘orando’); formulae repeated throughout the repertory (e.g. the music on ‘curasti’). This piece shares its melodic shape with three other antiphons in the repertory.
The simple and unified stylistic attributes of the Benevantan chant provide a view on a specific localized musical practice of the 8th century, a valuable repertory in itself and a paradigm for the early stages of chants found in more evolved forms in other repertories.
R. Andoyer: ‘L’ancienne liturgie de Bénévent’, Revue du chant grégorien, xx (1911–12), 176–83; xxi (1912–13), 14–20, 44–51, 81–5, 112–15, 144–8, 169–74; xxii (1913–14), 8–11, 41–4, 80–83, 106–11, 141–5, 170–72; xxiii (1919–20), 42–4, 116–18, 151–3, 182–3; xxiv (1920–21), 48–50, 87–9, 146–8, 182–5
Le codex 10673 de la Bibliothèque vaticane fonds latin (XIe siècle): graduel bénéventain, PalMus, 1st ser., xiv (1931–6/R)
Le codex VI.34 de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent (XIe–XIIe siècle): graduel de Bénévent avec prosaire et tropaire, PalMus, 1st ser., xv (1937–53/R)
R.-J. Hesbert: ‘L’“Antiphonale missarum” de l’ancien rit bénéventain’, Ephemerides liturgicae, lii (1938), 28–66, 141–58; liii (1939), 168–90; liv (1945), 69–95; lx (1946), 103–41; lxi (1947), 153–210
B. Baroffio: ‘Liturgie in beneventanischen Raum’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, ed. K.G. Fellerer, i (Kassel, 1972), 204–8
J. Boe: ‘A New Source for Old Beneventan Chant: the Santa Sophia Maundy in MS Ottoboni lat. 145’, AcM, lii (1980), 122–33
T. Bailey: ‘Ambrosian Chant in Southern Italy’, JPMMS, vi (1983), 1–7
J. Boe: ‘Old Beneventan Chant at Monte Cassino: Gloriosus Confessor Domini Benedictus’, AcM, lv (1983), 69–73
Le missel de Bénévent VI–33, PalMus, 1st ser., xx (1983)
T.F. Kelly: ‘Palimpsest Evidence of an Old-Beneventan Gradual’, KJb, lxvii (1983), 5–23
J. Mallet and A. Thibaut: Les manuscrits en écriture bénéventaine de la Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent (Paris, 1984–)
M. Huglo: ‘L’ancien chant bénéventain’, Ecclesia orans, ii (1985), 265–93
T.F. Kelly: ‘Montecassino and the Old-Beneventan Chant’, EMH, v (1985), 53–83
T.F. Kelly: ‘Beneventan and Milanese Chant’, JRMA, cxii (1987), 173–95
T.F. Kelly: ‘Une nouvelle source pour l’office vieux-bénéventain’, EG, xxii (1988), 5–23
T.F. Kelly: The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989)
N. Albarosa and A. Turco, eds.: Benevento, Biblioteca capitolare 40: Graduale (Padua, 1991)
Les témoins manuscrits du chant bénéventain, PalMus, 1st ser., xxi (1992)
T.F. Kelly: ‘A Musical Fragment at Bisceglie Containing an Unknown Beneventan Office’, Mediaeval Studies, lv (1993), 347–56 and 4 pls.
G. Cavallo, G. Orofino and O. Pecere: Exultet: rotoli liturgici del Medioevo meridionale (Rome, 1994)
THOMAS FORREST KELLY