In present-day liturgy a set of seven antiphons to the Magnificat, each text beginning with the exclamation ‘O’: ‘O sapientia’, ‘O adonai’, ‘O radix Jesse’, ‘O clavis David’, ‘O oriens’, ‘O Rex gentium’, ‘O Emmanuel’. One of these is sung on each of the seven days preceding Christmas Eve (see AM, 208–11). In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the number of antiphons was sometimes as many as 12, with added texts such as ‘O virgo virginum’ (the most popular), ‘O Gabriel’, ‘O Thomas Didyme’, ‘O Rex pacifice’ and ‘O Hierusalem’ (for example, a sequence of 11 antiphons beginning on 13 December is found in the 11th-century manuscript GB-Lbl Harl.2961). It would appear, however, that the first seven were conceived as a separate entity. For one thing, the texts of all seven follow the same basic pattern, first addressing Christ by different titles (‘Wisdom’, ‘Key of David’ etc.), then begging him to come to us (‘Veni’). Perhaps more striking is the acrostic that results when the first letters of the antiphons are read in reverse order: ‘ero cras’ (‘tomorrow I will be with you’), appropriate to the Advent season.
The antiphons originated at the latest in the 8th century: they were known to Alcuin (735–804) and Amalarius of Metz (775–850), and extensive paraphrases of the texts appear in a poem written before 800 by the English poet Cynewulf. The antiphons are all sung to the same 2nd mode melody. They inspired only a few polyphonic settings, the best-known being Josquin’s O virgo virginum. The texts of the seven plus O virgo virginum are troped in the tripla of a series of related isorhythmic motets in I-Tn J.II.9 (14th century). Attaingnant published settings of all seven in a book of motets for three, four, five and six voices, Liber septimus XXIIII (RISM 15349); there are also settings by J.W. Michl in St Peter und Paul, Weyarn. In the late 17th century, Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed settings for three voices and basso continuo.
‘Les grandes antiennes’, Revue bénédictine, ii (1885–6), 512–16
H. Thurston: ‘The Great Antiphons’, The Month (1905), 616–31
A. Weber: ‘Die sieben O-Antiphonen der Adventsliturgie’, Pastor bonus, xix (1906–7), 109–19
R. Hoppin: ‘The Cypriot-French Repertory of the Manuscript Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale, J.II.9’, MD, xi (1957), 79–125
R. Hoppin: ‘A Fifteenth-Century “Christmas Oratorio”’, Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 41–9
C. Callewaert: ‘De groote Adventsantifonen O’, Sacris erudiri (The Hague, 1962), 405–18
V.E. Fiala: ‘Eine Sonderform der O-Antiphonen’, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, xii (1970), 261–7
R. Münster and R. Machold: Thematischer Katalog der Musikhandschriften der ehemaligen Klosterkirchen Weyarn, Tegernsee und Benediktbeuern (Munich, 1971), 61–2
For further bibliography see Plainchant.
RICHARD SHERR