Benedictine monastery north of Paris. It was the burial-place of the French kings, and the first abbey to display elements of Gothic architecture. Over the centuries, St Denis forged a ritual, based on an embroidered history of the saint for whom it is named, that reflected both the royalist politics of the monks and the particular needs of the successive church buildings.
1. History and liturgical development.
ANNE WALTERS ROBERTSON
St Denis (Sanctus Dionysius) was a 3rd-century missionary, sent from Rome to serve as first bishop of Paris and martyred in the city in about 250. A basilica built over his tomb to the north of Paris in about 475 housed the first pre-monastic establishment. Merovingian kings adopted St Denis as their patron early on, and in the Carolingian era, King Louis the Pious asked Abbot Hilduin (814–41) to write an official life of the saint. The primary source on St Denis was the 6th-century account of Gregory of Tours, but Hilduin drew on other works instead. Among these were the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, the 5th-century Syrian author of four Neoplatonic metaphysical treatises in Greek (ed. and trans. C. Luibheid and P. Rorem, Mahwah, NJ, 1987) who had taken the name of the Pauline disciple Dionysius the Areopagite (see Acts xvii.22–34) to enhance his image. Hilduin’s conflation of the Pseudo-Dionysius/Dionysius the Areopagite figure with the 3rd-century apostle to Gaul, created a new, tripartite personnage who appealed to the French not only as the bishop and martyr he actually was, but also as a major thinker and follower of St Paul in Athens.
Hilduin’s forgery left numerous imprints on the liturgy of St Denis, for example, in the Greek Mass that the monks established under Abbot Guillaume de Gap (1172–86). Celebrated on the octave of the saint (16 October) until the French Revolution, this service reinforced the Pseudo-Dionysian portion of the saint’s persona through its use of Greek texts and, in some cases, music. This Greek Mass differed from the one sung in many Western churches, in which only the Ordinary was chanted in Greek on Pentecost (Atkinson), for at St Denis both Ordinary and Proper items were translated into Greek (using Latin letters). One of the more interesting chants in the ceremony was the Cheroubikon, or hymn of the cherubim, which was derived from the Byzantine rite to replace the offertory at St Denis. The text of this piece is laced with Pseudo-Dionysian symbolism in its references to the Trinity, the cherubim, and the angelic orders. At least seven Western sources for the Cheroubikon have survived, and vestiges of other parts of the ritual are preserved in ten manuscripts from the abbey (Robertson, 1991, pp.285–98).
In other ways, too, the interaction of music and ceremony with the political aspirations of the monks is evident at St Denis. Twice during the Merovingian period the congregation prominently exhibited their devotion to the royal house through the practice of perpetual psalmody (laus perennis), a ritual in which shifts of monks sang psalms continually between each of the Offices so that unceasing praise filled the abbey. The first royal patron of St Denis, King Dagobert (d 639), instituted this rite, and his son Clovis II renewed it in 654; both attempts were short-lived. St Denis again entered the limelight in the mid-8th century, when Pope Stephen II sojourned in the abbey in the winter of 754. Personnel from the Roman Schola Cantorum accompanied the pope on this visit, and demonstrations of the Roman liturgy and its chant, which Charlemagne (764–814) subsequently tried to promote throughout Francia, were no doubt held at St Denis during these stays.
The monks also enhanced their alliance with the crown by interpolating and celebrating anniversaries for their royal benefactors. Such ceremonies began in earnest in the 12th century, when Abbot Adam (1099–1122) compiled a ritual entitled In natali Dagoberti regis, which drew on the ritual of the Office of the Dead and the Requiem Mass. The monks arranged this and all subsequent anniversaries in much the same manner that they ordered the standard feasts of the liturgical year: they specified numbers of singers for prominent chants, numbers of candles, type of ceremonial garb, and the like, in strictly hierarchical fashion. During the 13th century the anniversaries for King Dagobert and Philip Augustus were the most resplendent, equalling the pomp of Christmas, Easter and other principal feasts. Certain other kings (Philip IV, Charles IV, Louis X, Philip III, Louis VIII, Robert II and Louis VI) had only a slightly lower level of observance, similar to the duplex services for feasts of saints whose relics lay in the church. The ever-growing number of royal anniversaries seems to have checked the expansion of the St Denis calendar in the 14th and 15th centuries, preventing the abbey from embracing the festivals of popular saints of the late Middle Ages (e.g. Valery, Joseph, Lazarus) as well as some of the late Marian feasts.
Like the royal-monastic alliance, the four rebuildings of St Denis and the lesser additions to the fabric of the church inspired the creation of new rituals. The original basilica (c475), refurbished by King Dagobert in the 7th century, was replaced by Abbot Fulrad’s (750–84) Carolingian church in the late 8th century. Abbot Hilduin and William the Conqueror, respectively, added a chapel and a tower to the structure in the 9th and 11th centuries. Hilduin’s chapel was dedicated to Mary and All Saints and probably occasioned the compilation of seven masses for Mary and All Saints, found in the sacramentary F-R A.566. When Abbot Suger (1122–51) built the Gothic church in the 1140s, he renewed the performance of the Saturday Office for the Virgin, established the Thursday Office for St Denis, and undoubtedly oversaw the copying of the magnificent antiphoner F-Pn lat.17296 (inventory in CAO, ii, 1965). The final reconstruction of St Denis, which took place under four abbots who served between 1231 and 1281, witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of processions to chapels in the chevet, the elevation of the ranks of feasts, the copying of additional new service books, the composition of new sequences, and the foundation of a Confraternity of St Denis. By the mid-14th century, the liturgy of St Denis was virtually complete, although a daily Lady Mass for the Chapel of Notre Dame La Blanche in the north transept was added in the late 14th century. By 1411 there were 24 chaplaincies in the church, many of them endowed by lay persons.
The substantial number of service books from St Denis that have survived offer access to the music, as well as the ceremonies, of the church. For the chants of the Office there is the antiphoner F-Pn lat.17296, which, in combination with the ordinals from the 13th and the 14th centuries (F-Pm 526, Pn lat.976, Paris, Archives Nationales L 863, no.10), aptly depicts the celebration of the medieval Office in the abbey. Music for the Mass is preserved in four notated graduals and missals dating from the 11th and 14th centuries (F-Pm 384; Pn lat.1107; Pn lat.10505; GB-Lv 1346–1891); all but the third are splendidly illuminated. The gradual-antiphoner of Mont-Renaud (PalMus, 1st ser. xvi, 1955/R), once thought to hail from St Denis (G. Beyssac, RdM, xl, 1957, pp.131–50), is now thought to have originated in the abbey of Corbie or one of its dependencies (Robertson, 1991, pp.425–34).
Several St Denis sources exemplify the various developments in French notation. The slightly slanted neumes found in F-Pm 384 (facs. in R.-J. Hesbert, Le graduel de St. Denis, Paris, 1981; see Notation, §III, 1(iv)(a)), which may be taken as typical of the St Denis scriptorium in the 11th century, gave way to the 12th-century neumes on dry-point staff lines of F-Pn lat.17296. By contrast, the perfectly straight neumes of F-Pn lat.9436, a sacramentary-gradual which was copied for St Denis, show its place of origin to be the scriptorium of St Vaast in Arras. The later square notation of St Denis is illustrated in the 13th- and 14th-century missals.
Despite the imposition of Roman chant throughout the Frankish Church by the early Carolingians, several chants of Gallican origin are thought to have been preserved at St Denis. Several of the great processional antiphons found near the end of F-Pn lat.17296 are likely to be Gallican, along with the antiphon Deus omnipotens in F-Pm 384, which contains a popular Merovingian configuration of the names of the patron saint and his two companions in martyrdom, Eleutherius and Rusticus. (In texts from the 8th century onwards, these names appear in the order Dionysius, Rusticus, Eleutherius.) Antiphons were chanted before the Gospel reading at St Denis on the 18 highest feasts of the year (see Gallican chant, §7(vii)), and a few of these may also be Gallican survivors or remodellings of such chants, for example, Salvator omnium Deus, which the monks sang on King Dagobert’s anniversary (Walters, 1985).
As with the liturgy of St Denis, the musical repertory grew along with the church. Prosulas for the feasts of St Stephen, St John, the Holy Innocents and the Virgin Mary, found alongside a sizable number of responsory melismas in F-Pn lat.17296, are unique to St Denis. Ex.1 shows the prosula Christo nato de Virgine, for the feast of the Holy Innocents. The tropes for the Mass Proper in F-Pn lat.1107 include several well-known examples for Christmas and Easter, as well as many of the widely circulated tropes for the Mass Ordinary. St Denis sources are the sole witness to one Kyrie trope (O Christe precamur), the incipit of which appears in F-Pm 526 (ed. in E. Foley, The First Ordinary of the Royal Abbey of St. Denis in France, Fribourg, 1990) and F-Pn lat.976, and to the music of one untexted melismatic communion trope for St Stephen found in F-Pm 384.
Two important series of monophonic melodies for the Benedicamus Domino and Ite missa est found in the 13th-century missal F-Pn lat.1107 help explain the written and unwritten histories of these genres. Most striking are the length and expansiveness of these melodies, for they are taken from the melismas of other prolix chants (usually reponsories and alleluias). Specific directions for their liturgical placement appear in the ordinals; like the melodies for the Ordinary of the Mass, the tunes for the Benedicamus Domino and Ite missa est were ordered hierarchically, so that one melody might serve the highest feasts, while another was used for duplex festivals of saints whose relics lay in the church, and so forth. The method of recording the chants in F-Pn lat.1107 is especially noteworthy: they are preserved in the kyriale, preceded by cues naming the sources of the melismas. The presence of the cues suggests that these chants were composed orally, and the placement of syllables, along with the phrasing, which most often corresponds to that of the parent source, strengthens the impression of oral improvisation. These procedures may account for the fact that music for the Benedicamus Domino and Ite missa est is scarce in the late Middle Ages.
Two music theorists were apparently connected with St Denis. The late-13th-century Tractatus de tonis of Guy de Saint-Denis deals with plainchant and draws on Boethius, Guido of Arezzo, Petrus de Cruce and Johannes de Garlandia. Most of his examples are taken from the music of the abbey, and he often distinguishes between the practice at St Denis (‘secundum usum nostrum’) and the use of Notre Dame of Paris and Amiens Cathedral. The Tractatus de Musica of Petrus de Sancto Dionysio (ed. U. Michels, CSM, xvii, 1972) shows this monk’s familiarity with current mensural practices of the early 14th century, particularly those of Johannes de Muris. St Denis seems to have cultivated little if any polyphony, and Petrus probably came to know de Muris’s work as a student at the Collège de Saint-Denis, a residence in Paris for scholar-monks of the abbey (Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, 1982). Michels (op. cit.) suggested that Petrus is the same as Anonymus 6 (CoussemakerS, iii, 398–403) because of the striking similarities in the first parts of the two treatises.
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