(Gk.: ‘evening’).
An evening Office in the Greek Orthodox Church, equivalent to Vespers of the Roman rite. Together with Orthros, the morning Office, it is one of the principal hours in both the urban and monastic rites.
Although the observance of evening prayer independent of any vigil had become customary in Christian communities in the East by the 4th century, it was only some 200 years later that a specifically Eastern liturgy for the evening Office developed, distinct from that celebrated in the Western Church. An account of the evening Office as it was performed on the Sinai peninsula during the 6th century includes the name of a Greek hymn, Phōs hilaron (‘O gladsome light’), whose words are still sung at Hesperinos today.
In the 6th century differences emerged in the way the Byzantine Office was celebrated in monasteries and in urban churches. Each of these liturgical traditions evolved within two distinct geographical and ecclesiastical regions: the monastic Office developed in the south, in the Laura of St Sabas near Jerusalem; and that of the urban churches in the north, in the political centre of Constantinople. The Great Church of Hagia Sophia in the imperial capital performed its own special urban or ‘chanted’ rite (Asmatikē akolouthia), while the liturgical practice in Greek monasteries was influenced by the Palestinian traditions at St Sabas.
The Great Church of Hagia Sophia maintained its authority over the chanting of the urban Office among metropolitan areas in the empire until 1204 when its elaborate Greek services were suppressed by Latin crusaders. Even before this date, however, the Office liturgy of Hagia Sophia had already begun to merge with the monastic tradition of St Sabas. By 1453, when the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks, a hybrid rite had emerged composed of elements from both the urban and monastic traditions. This rite, the culmination of nine centuries of liturgical conflict and reconciliation in the East, reached its maturity only in the late empire; it proved to be a lasting tradition and the antecedent of the Office of Hesperinos observed in the Greek Orthodox Church today.
Descriptions of the urban Office survive only from the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century. Archbishop Symeon of Thessaloniki wrote his treatise Peri tēs theias proseuchēs (De sacra precatione, PG, clv, 535–670) 200 years after the urban rite of Constantinople had ceased to exert its influence, and described this rite not as it was celebrated in Hagia Sophia in the imperial capital but as he performed it in his own church of Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki. By then the urban service was more a vestige of past imperial splendour in a provincial city than a living rite. Although a few 14th-century Akolouthiaimanuscripts transmit the melodies of chants for Hesperinos and Orthros, in this archaic form the anonymous repertory of the urban liturgy stands outside the musical developments during the last two centuries of the empire. There is a prose description of the Offices of the new mixed rite in the Diataxis tēs hierodiakonias (Ordo sacri ministerii; PG, cliv, 745–66) written before 1379 by Philotheos, Patriarch of Constantinople. This document provides a detailed account of the liturgical actions of the priest and deacon and is the most comprehensive commentary on the Byzantine Office from the late empire. A second, more cursory description is contained in a 15th-century work, the Exēgēsis tēs ekklēsiastikēs akolouthias(Expositio officii ecclesiastici, PG, clx, 1163–94) by Markos Eugenikos, Archbishop of Ephesus.
At the beginning of the 14th century the fully developed mixed rite received attention from Byzantine composers. The oldest extant sources that transmit the new musical repertory for the Byzantine Office are the two early 14th-century manuscripts ET-MSsc 1256 and 1257 (copied in 1309 and 1332 respectively) and the earliest extant akolouthiai manuscript GR-An 2458 (copied in 1336). These three manuscripts show that at the beginning of the 14th century Joannes Koukouzeles revised the musical repertory of the Office and transformed both the musical vocabulary and the performing practice. This process of musical enrichment continued throughout the 14th and 15th centuries and even beyond. In each successive akolouthiai manuscript, newly composed chant melodies were increasingly attributed to contemporary Byzantine composers.
The Ordinary chants and psalmody for Hesperinos are generally found in the akolouthiai manuscripts, while the music for the Proper chants is supplied from the Stichērarion. The order of Hesperinos on Saturday evenings and the evenings before important feasts in the fully developed mixed Byzantine rite runs as follows:
(i) The prooimiakos (Psalm ciii): a selection of verses from Psalm ciii, beginning with verse 28b and concluding with 24b, and the refrain Doxa soi, ho Theos (‘Glory to Thee, O God’); it is preceded by a short, anonymous invitatory. The two halves of the choir sing the verses antiphonally in a relatively simple psalmodic style. Some of the verse melodies in the akolouthiai manuscripts are anonymous, but others are newly composed and attributed to specific composers. In the older, traditional chants the unembellished refrain is no more than a brief appendage after a line from the psalm. With the appearance in the 14th century of new melodies for Psalm ciii, both the text and the music of the simple refrain were gradually expanded. Originally the refrain consisted of the repetition of one or two words, but by the 15th century it overshadowed and in some cases dominated the psalm text and reflected subtle theological nuances in its tropes. Vocal range was also expanded in the new repertory (the older chants were predominantly conjunct). For the final verse and the doxology the choir united in a more florid setting.
(ii) The kathisma: a division of the Psalter (approximately one-twentieth of the complete text). As the entire Psalter was sung once a week, starting at Great Hesperinos on Saturday, selected verses from Psalms i–iii, the first division (stasis) of the first kathisma are found in the akolouthiai manuscripts, beginning with Makarios anēr (Psalm i.1a). A number of traditional anonymous and local melodies are preserved together with ‘quasi-traditional’ settings ascribed to named composers. Most akolouthiai manuscripts also contain an additional repertory of kalophonic (‘beautified’) verses for Psalm ii. Compared with the simple psalm settings, the kalophonic chants are extensive, melismatic works with a rhapsodic vocal style (see Kalophonic chant, and Byzantine chant §12).
(iii) The Kyrie ekekraxa: a complex of psalms (cxl, cxli, cxxix and cxvi), of which the first two verses only (the kekragarion) are provided with melodies in the akolouthiai manuscripts; the melodies for the rest of the chant were probably generated from these relatively simple psalmodic settings. In the manuscripts a kekragarion is supplied for each of the eight modes. Depending on the importance of the feast, stichēra (see Stichēron) were interpolated between the last ten, eight, six or four verses of the psalm complex.
(iv) The Phōs hilaron: an ancient Christian hymn dating from the 6th century at least. Its melody was transmitted orally until the 17th century, when notations show that a single very simple and rather monotonous melody in the 4th plagal mode probably lay behind all the earliest notated settings.
(v) A Prokeimenon: a chant sung before the evening readings. The psaltika and akolouthiai manuscripts contain a set of eight prokeimena, one for Hesperinos on each day of the week and one for Sunday morning. These psalm verses were performed responsorially in the ‘psaltikon’ style. The melodies of the refrains (the dochai) are contained in the asmatikon manuscripts.
(vi) The aposticha: a selection of stichēra with single psalm verses and a concluding doxology.
(vii) The Trisagion.
(viii) The troparion apolytikion (see Troparion).
F. Mercenier and F.Paris: La prière des églises de rite byzantin, i (Chevetogne, 1937)
O. Strunk: ‘The Byzantine Office at Hagia Sophia’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, ix–x (1956), 175–202
N.D. Uspensky: ‘Pravoslavnaya vechernyaya (istoriko-liturgicheskiy ocherk)’ [Orthodox Vespers: historico-liturgical essay], Bogoslovskiye trudï, i (1960), 7–52
G. Dévai: ‘Phōs hilaron’, Acta antiqua Academiae scientiarum hungaricae, xi (1963), 407–14; xiii (1965), 455–61
E.V. Williams: John Koukouzeles’ Reform of Byzantine Chanting for Great Vespers in the Fourteenth Century (diss., Yale U., 1968)
M. Velimirović: ‘The Prooimiac Psalm of Byzantine Vespers’, Words and Music: the Scholar’s View: in Honour of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. L. Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 317–37
A. Jung: ‘The Settings of the Evening and Morning Psalms according to the Manuscript Sinai 1255’, Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Age grec et latin, xlvii (1984), 3–63
R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville, MN, 1986)
S. Kujumdzieva: ‘The “Kekragaria” in the Sources from the 14th to the Beginning of the 19th Century’, Cantus Planus VI: Éger 1993, 449–63
EDWARD V. WILLIAMS/CHRISTIAN TROELSGÅRD