The formal dismissal of the Mass consisting of the words ‘Ite missa est’ (‘Go, you are dismissed’) answered by ‘Deo gratias’ (‘Thanks be to God’). The use of ‘missa’ in the sense of dismissal is quite ancient: by the early Middle Ages this meaning had been lost. Jungmann was thus of the opinion that ‘this formula is as old as the Latin Mass itself’; it certainly dates from at least the 4th century. In fact the very term ‘Mass’ (missa), which replaced the earlier ‘eucharistia’, is taken from this phrase. The Ite missa est is an element of the Ordinary and was originally sung or chanted at the end of every Mass. In the 11th century, however, a change took place that resulted in the inclusion of the Ite only in masses with a Gloria; on other occasions the Benedicamus Domino replaced it.
A number of melodies have survived (see Robertson for those in the service books of the abbey of St Denis), and there are 28 troped forms of the Ite in manuscripts from St Gallen and St Martial. The first source in which the Ite missa est is grouped with the other Ordinary chants is the 14th-century manuscript F-TLm 94, containing a collection of cyclic mass Ordinaries as well as a polyphonic mass, the so-called Mass of Toulouse; of the nine cycles, seven include the Ite missa est and two the Benedicamus Domino. With regard to the cycles of the Edition vaticana, Apel remarked that most of the Ite chants are identical to the Kyries in each cycle ‘thus bestowing upon the cycle a noteworthy trait of musical unity’. Apparently, there was a tradition of adopting Kyrie melodies for the Ite, although other chants were also used, both for the Ite missa est and for the Benedicamus Domino (see Hiley). There is, however, no evidence of an older tradition of such unified cycles; only two of the Ite chants in TLm 94 are like their associated Kyries. An interesting observation concerning Ite melodies was offered by Fischer who showed that the ‘Ite missa est V. toni’ is in fact a contrafactum of the Abgesang of the Minnesang Meie hât wünnechlîche entsproszen formerly ascribed to Neidhart von Reuental.
There are very few polyphonic settings, possibly because composers considered the Ite missa est a postlude and not really part of the Ordinary. The extant settings are all 14th-century, the most famous being that of Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame. Two other settings, in the Mass of Tournai and the Mass of Toulouse, are in fact motets with an ‘Ite missa est’ as tenor.
J.A. Jungmann: Missarum sollemnia: eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe (Vienna1948, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1951–5, abridged 2/1961)
W. Apel: Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, IN, 1958, 3/1966)
W. Fischer: ‘Die Herkunft des “Ite missa est” V. toni’, Festschrift Alfred Orel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. Federhofer (Vienna, 1960), 67–72
H. Stäblein-Harder, ed.: Fourteenth-Century Mass Music in France, MSD, vii (1962)
R. Stephan: ‘Das Schlussstück der “Messe von Toulouse”’, Analysen: Beiträge zu einer Problemgeschichte des Komponierens: Festschrift für Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, ed. W. Breig, R. Brinkmann and E. Budde (Wiesbaden, 1984), 40–45
A.W. Robertson: ‘The Transmission of Music and Liturgy from Saint-Denis to Saint-Corneille of Compiègne’, IMSCR XIV: Bologna 1987, iii, 505–14
C. Hospenthal: ‘Beobachtungen zu den Ite missa est im Tropenbestand der Handschriften aus dem Kloster Rheinau’, Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, new ser., x (1990), 11–18
A.W. Robertson: The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1991)
D. Hiley: Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993)
RICHARD SHERR