The prayer that Christ taught his disciples (Matthew vi.9–13; Luke xi.2–4). Variants of the biblical texts reflect early Aramaic-Syriac and Greek oral traditions as well as liturgical and semi-liturgical accretions. The liturgical Latin text was established within the Roman rite by the early 7th century; Pope Gregory I moved it from its place after the Fraction in the Mass to its present position after the Eucharistic Prayer, as in the Eastern rites. In Gregory’s reform it was recited only by the celebrant. The exordium introducing the prayer and a simple form of the concluding embolism (beginning ‘Libera nos quesumus domine ab omnibus malis’) may also date from Gregory’s time; but similar accretions are found in Eastern and in other Latin rites (see Boe, 1998). The prayer also originally concluded each service of the Divine Office, where it was prayed silently, the officiant raising his voice only at the phrase ‘Et ne nos inducas in temptationem’ so that all might answer ‘Sed libera nos a malo’; but according to the Rule of St Benedict the prayer was to be sung aloud at the end of Lauds and Vespers by the senior monk present.
Before about 1050 the Pater noster was generally transmitted orally, the celebrant knowing only the local version of the melody, which would have been in so-called ‘anaphoral chant’ (for a description of anaphoral chant, see K. Levy, ‘The Byzantine Sanctus and its Modal Tradition in East and West’, AnnM, vi, 1958–63, pp.7–67). The embolisms of the melodies in ex.1 are different contemporary versions of an anaphoral chant formula using the pitches ut, re and mi. However, as early as the late 10th century, notation for the Pater noster began to be inserted in sacramentaries and missals in order to control or replace local versions, or simply to act as an aide-mémoire for the celebrant. Three separate melodic traditions dating from the late 10th century and the 11th are identifiable: two were sung mainly in southern Italy and the third principally north of the Alps.
The first melodic formulation is found as the sole chant in votive missals for parish and chantry priests and in miscellaneous collections, especially those containing Masses for the Dead. The melody appears first in a votive missal from the Monte Cassino region (I-MC 426, c1000), and in later Cassinese manuscripts is given the rubric ‘In cotidianis diebus’ (‘for daily use’). It appears in a number of south Italian manuscripts from the 12th and 13th centuries; ex.1 shows the version from I-Rvat 7231 (13th century), which, as in other later manuscripts, has internal phrases that are notated one step higher than in the earlier manuscripts (I-MC 426, f.35v; MC 339, f.65v); these are indicated by brackets above the staff. The earliest source for the second melody is a gradual (I-BV 40) probably copied at the abbey of S Sofia in Benevento in the first half of the 11th century; the melody is transcribed in ex.1 for comparison with the melody for daily use. This formulation was used for Sundays and feast days at Monte Cassino (I-MC 339: rubric ‘In dominicis seu festis diebus’); it was also used in the churches of Salerno and adjoining areas, in regional monasteries and at the Lombard court.
The third melody appears in 11th-century manuscripts from all over northern Europe, but only occasionally in southern Italy, where it was given the rubric ‘Francisca’ (‘Frankish’ it may have been entered in Cassinese altarbooks as an alternative chant for use by northern clergy; for more detailed discussion see Boe, 1998). Ex.2 shows the versions of the melody from the abbey of Figeac in Aquitaine (F-Pn 2293; 11th century, melody in heighted Aquitanian neumes) and St Denis (Pn 9436, mid-11th century, melody in northern French neumes, slightly heighted), in contrast to a decorated southern Italian version (I-Rc 614; 12th century, Beneventan script and notation) and the 13th-century Franciscan festal version (F-Pn 10503; second half of 13th century, notated with F-clef on five-line staff), which is almost identical to the festal tone of the Vatican edition. This formulation also served as the basis for the Sarum and Dominican chants (see below).
All three formulations arrange the pitches ut re mi fa in a repeated series of inflections generally moving by step. The first formulation originally employed the initial pitches ut re mi, a medial cadence út–re(re) re, and a final cadence ré–mi re. It may derive from a Milanese chant resembling a psalm tone (see Cabrol, 1929; and Boe, 1981). In the second and third formulations, each repeated member of the series begins with one or two similar forephrases and ends with a distinct afterphrase – in similar manner to the recitation tones for prefaces and readings. While the two south Italian formulations (though independent in origin) both use the initial ut re mi mi, the northern melody instead used the inverted form mí re–ut re mi for ‘Páter noster’ and ‘Pánem nostrum’. But in the north after about 1200, this form came to be replaced (possibly owing to Cistercian reforms: see Choisselet and Vernet) by the rising inflection ut re mi mi found in the Dominican standard melody of 1267 and notably in the Franciscan festal and ferial chants, which were soon adopted by the Roman curia and eventually in the Vatican edition of 1907, as well as in Sarum books after about 1300. (See fig.1, from F-Pa 135, an early Sarum missal where the original inverted initial at these words was erased and replaced by the rising inflection.) Nevertheless, the northern melody remains distinct from the southern Italian ones in several respects: for example, the ecphonesis ‘Per omnia secula seculorum’ begins on la below ut in the northern melody but not in the southern formulations (see Boe, 1998). Conservative institutions like Cluny and some cathedrals long retained the old inverted form of the initial figure. Local variants of all melodies exist, especially where mi, when accented or climactic, was raised to fa: for example, the initials ut re FÁ mi or FÁ re–ut re mi.
In the 13th century a new penitential Pater noster chant appeared in response to the purgatorial aspects emphasized in the ever more numerous votive Masses for the Dead. This austere, unornamented ferial chant, supplied in Franciscan missals, was developed from the Franciscan festal melody (and is therefore related to the northern chant); it should not be confused with the nearly syllabic reformed chant that was sung by the Cistercians at all masses.
In Masses of the Gallican rite, Pater noster seems to have immediately preceded the Communion and to have been recited by all; if sung, no source survives. The Mozarabic Pater noster formula found in a 1755 edition of Cardinal Ximenes’s Missale mixtum of 1500 is well known: the ‘Amen’ interjections are authentically Mozarabic, but the oral tradition for the melody must have been slender at best. At Rome, the tradition for Pater noster was purely oral before northern pontificals arrived (cf I-Rc 614 in ex.2) and before Franciscan chants and notation were adopted in the 13th century. Thus the origins of the northern melody remain unclear: it may have gone north from Rome in the 8th century, or it may have been reshaped from anaphoral chant by Frankish celebrants.
Rare instances of tropes for Pater noster are found in some manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries, generally in unusual liturgical contexts. Later examples were non-liturgical. (See Stäblein, 1977.) The festal melody was used as a cantus firmus by Renaissance composers (there are settings by Willaert, Gombert, Lassus and Palestrina, among others); many settings of the text do not use the chant melody at all.
In the Anglican rite the Lord’s Prayer, complete with exordium, was first set to English for the Communion service of 1549 by John Marbeck in his short-lived Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550). Marbeck freely adapted the northern Pater noster chant, using one note per syllable but notes of different lengths. At Mattins and Evensong, Marbeck treated the last two phrases of the Lord’s Prayer as versicle and response, just as at the Latin lesser Hours, the rest of the text being either monotoned or possibly spoken. A few composers set the Lord’s Prayer chorally, but most Tudor and Jacobean choral settings for the cathedral Office do not include it. The choral settings by Robert Stone and John Farmer (i) are now sometimes sung with such responses. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sarum and 1907 Vatican chants for Pater noster were more closely adapted to the English text for the Anglican Eucharist by G.W. Palmer and C.W. Douglas, among others. Following the Second Vatican Council, new chants have been composed and older chants (such as that of the Mozarabic Pater noster) have been fitted to the revised texts of the Anglican rite and the Roman rite in English.
Grove6 (R. Steiner)
MGG1 (B. Stäblein)
MGG2 (K. Schlager)
P. Wagner: Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien, iii: Gregorianische Formenlehre: eine choralische Stilkunde (Leipzig, 1921/R)
F. Cabrol: ‘Le chant du Pater à la messe’, Revue grégorienne, xiii (1928), 161–8; xiv (1929), 1–17
H. Leclercq: ‘Messe’, §25; ‘Oraison dominicale’, Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Marrou, xi (Paris, 1933); xii (Paris, 1936)
J. Claire: ‘L’évolution modale dans les récitatifs liturgiques’, Revue grégorienne, xli (1963), 127–51
B. Stäblein: ‘Pater-Noster-Tropen’, Sacerdos et cantus gregoriani magister: Festschrift Ferdinand Haberl, ed. F.A. Stein (Regensburg, 1977), 247–78
J. Boe: ‘The Neumes and Pater Noster Chant of Montecassino Codex 426’, Monastica: scritti raccolti in memoria del XV centenario della nascita di S. Benedetto, i, Miscellanea cassinese, xliv (Monte Cassino, 1981), 219–35
D. Choisselet and P.Vernet, eds.: Les ‘Ecclesiastica officia’ cisterciens du XIIe siècle: texte latin selon les manuscrits édités de Trente 1711, Ljubljana 31 et Dijon 114 (Oelenberg, 1989)
J. Boe: ‘The Frankish Pater Noster Chant: Tradition and Anaphoral Context’, Chant and its Peripheries: Essays in Honour of Terence Bailey, ed. B. Gillingham and P. Merkeley (Ottawa, 1998), 179–203
J. Boe, ed.: Ordinary Chants and Tropes for the Mass from Southern Italy, A.D. 1000–1250, iv: Pater Noster Chants and Agnus Dei, with Ite Missa Est (Madison, WI, forthcoming)
JOHN BOE