With Milan and Aquileia, Ravenna was a major ecclesiastical centre of northern Italy during the last centuries of the western Empire and the period immediately following. Ravenna is approximately 160 km south of Venice, a short distance inland from the coast; it came into prominence with its selection as the imperial capital by Honorius in 402. It fell successively to the Goths in 493, the Byzantine Empire in 540, the Lombards in 751 and the Franks in 754; Pepin bestowed it upon Pope Stephen III and thus founded the temporal power of the papacy.
Ravenna reached the heights of its political power and artistic eminence during the 5th and 6th centuries: these are stunningly reflected in combinations of builder's stone and mosaic tile which include the mausoleum of Galla Placidia (d 450), the Orthodox and Arian baptisteries, the archiepiscopal chapel, the tomb of Theodoric and the churches of S Vitale, S Apollinare at the nearby town of Classe, and S Apollinare Nuovo.
Very little remains of Ravenna's liturgical music. Where Milan preserves the full repertory of its medieval liturgical chant (see Ambrosian chant), the early chant dialect of Ravenna has all but disappeared. The city's importance as a liturgical centre up to the mid-8th century, though perhaps exaggerated in Gamber's proposal that the mixed Gelasian sacramentaries originated at Ravenna, suggests that its chant repertory may to some extent have developed independently. Two chants from the Easter Vigil Mass for neophytes can be regarded as possible survivors from this period: an alleluia with verses from Psalm cxxxv, the first of which is Confitemini Domino quoniam, and Qui in Christo baptizati estis (?offertory), related musically to it. The text and music of the latter are derived from a Byzantine baptismal troparion, Hosoi eis Christon, which was adapted musically in other ways in the Beneventan, Old Roman and Gregorian melodic traditions. These two Ravenna chants reveal an elegance of centonate structure (see Centonization) not matched elsewhere in the West except among the more sophisticated chants of the Gregorian tradition.
Two other unusual chants found at Ravenna are known also in manuscripts from the Beneventan region of southern Italy (see Beneventan chant), in the central Italian provinces and in the intervening backwater of the Abruzzi; there is no trace of them in manuscripts reflecting Roman practice. Like parts of southern Italy, Ravenna, during the Byzantine Exarchate (540–751), was a natural point of entry into Italy and the West for chants of Eastern Orthodox Origin; one such chant, the Greco-Latin antiphon Hote tō staurō/O quando in cruce, is both musically and textually a borrowing of an Eastern hymn for the Good Friday Hours, attributed to Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634–8). The other chant is a hymn or versus in hexameters (Lux de luce Deus tenebris illuxit averni) whose presumably original form, with a single musical pattern repeated for each verse, is found only in the Ravenna sources. It is thought that both of these chants were in use before the mid-8th century, for at that time the Byzantine link between Ravenna and southern Italy was effectively broken by the Lombard conquest of the north. Whether they were introduced in the north before the south, however, is uncertain, but a northern origin is probable at least for Lux de luce.
Other survivals of the characteristic Ravenna practice may be distinguished among the Proper chants (in particular, the alleluias, offertories and sequences) for saints venerated locally, particularly Apollinaris, Vitalis, Agricola and Fusca. The alleluia with the verse Accipe spiritum sanctum for St Apollinaris is an example of a chant composed later (though before the 11th century) at Ravenna. Although no early antiphoners of the Office from Ravenna survive, there are three fine versions of the antiphonale missarum from this region, dating from the 11th and 12th centuries: US–BAw W.11 (a missale plenum); I-Pc A.47; and MOe 0.1.7. Fragments of Ravenna office-books survive in I-Rvat lat.4750 and perhaps Rvat lat.85.
Another important possible source of the early Ravenna chant repertory may be the liturgy of Milan. During the late 5th century and the early 6th, the Milanese bishops took refuge from the Lombard occupation of Milan at Genoa, which was at that time strongly influenced by Byzantium by way of Ravenna. There are many chants of eastern origin in the Milanese liturgy which, it has been suggested, were originally introduced under the contemporary influence of Ravenna.
By the early 11th century – and perhaps much earlier – most traces of the older local chants had been extinguished at Ravenna as they had throughout Europe. When St Romuald (c951–1027), a native of the city and sometime abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Classe, founded the Camaldolese order, he seems to have drawn on the monastic rite in use at Classe, which had already been influenced by the Cluniac reform (see PalMus, 1st ser., ix, 1906/R, p.13). In the late 11th century, however, there was a local renewal, for which St Peter Damian (1007–72) seems to have been largely responsible; he was himself the author of a number of hymns. A noted Mass Proper for St Apollinaris and a noted Office for St Silvester, appended to an early collection of Peter's works (I-Rvat lat.3797, dating from c1100), contain some local material; this may represent a genuine early survival, or perhaps the introduction of new compositions in an archaic style.
MGG1 (‘Italien’, §A; B. Stäblein)
H.M. Bannister: ‘Gli inni di S. Pietro Damiano’, Rassegna gregoriana, viii (1908), 262–4
C. Blume, ed.: Analecta hymnica medii aevi, li (Leipzig, 1908), 238–43
A. Wilmart: ‘Le recueil des poèmes et des prières de Saint-Pierre Damien’, Revue bénédictine, xli (1929), 342–57
E. Wellesz: Eastern Elements in Western Chant, MMB. Subsidia, ii (1947), 68ff, 95ff
G. Vecchi: ‘Lirica liturgica ravennate’, Studi romagnoli, iii (1952), 243–8
B. Stäblein: ‘Von der Sequenz zum Strophenlied: eine neue Sequenzmelodie “archaischen” Stiles’, Mf, vii (1954), 257–68
M. Huglo: ‘Antifone antiche per la fractio panis’, Ambrosius, xxxi (1955), 85–95
P. Borella: Il rito ambrosiano (Brescia, 1964), 30ff, 84ff
K. Gamber: ‘Das Missale des Bischofs Maximian von Ravenna’, Ephemerides liturgicae, lxxx (1966), 205–10
K. Gamber: Codices liturgici latini antiquiores (Fribourg, 1963, 2/1968; suppl., ed. B. Baroffio and others, 1988), 111–12, 119–20, 123–4, 222
K. Levy: ‘The Italian Neophytes' Chants’, JAMS, xxiii (1970), 181–227
K. Levy: ‘Lux de luce: the Origin of an Italian Sequence’, MQ, lvii (1971), 40–61
G. Cattin: ‘Sequenze nell'area ravennate: abozzo di analisi testuale’, La sequenza medievale: Milan 1984, 45–57
KENNETH LEVY/R