An acclamation of the Latin Mass, sung by choir or congregation at the conclusion of the Preface, just before the Canon, as the musical item most closely associated with the eucharistic phase of the Mass. Since the text of the Sanctus does not change from day to day, it is counted as part of the Ordinary of the Mass. Numerous melodies were composed from the 10th century onwards; a selection of these is contained in the Liber usualis, Masses I to XVIII, together with three ad libitum melodies.
The Sanctus text is the oldest of the acclamations of the Mass, even though it seems to have been added to the Eucharistic Prayer some time between the 1st century and the 5th. It functions as a conclusion for, and people’s response to, the Preface (sung by the celebrant), a rehearsal of God’s acts with particular emphasis on those for which thanks are to be rendered on a given occasion. In the early centuries (at least until 800), the Sanctus was sung by everyone, clergy and people, as a terrestrial analogue of the celestial praises of Cherubim and Seraphim described in Isaiah vi.3 (whence the text comes). In the same context the Sanctus appears in the Te Deum, the great prose hymn dating from before the 6th century.
The same Sanctus text is used in Greek in the Eastern liturgies in the same way. There is, however, another ‘thrice-holy’, the Greek Trisagion (‘Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us’) which is a different item with a different liturgical function; it appears in the Roman rite only on Good Friday.
Sanctus melodies appear in Western manuscripts from the 10th century onwards. Thannabaur’s catalogue lists 230; there are eight more in Hiley’s supplement (1986), and a number of others in an edition by Atkinson (MMMA, forthcoming), bringing the total to over 270 (see MGG2). Distribution of the melodies among the sources shows (as for other items of the Ordinary) that a few melodies, largely from the 11th and 12th centuries, were widely known and used, while a much larger number of melodies were purely local products, appearing in only one or a few manuscripts. Composition of melodies continued throughout the later Middle Ages, especially during the 15th century.
Among the early Western manuscripts a melody is preserved with the Greek text and is presumed to be a Byzantine import (Huglo); the presumption has been substantiated, at least for the first part of the melody (‘Agios, agios, agios’) by a Greek melody from the 13th or 14th century that probably represents an earlier Byzantine congregational practice (Levy). The same melody for the three acclamations ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus’, however, also appears in the melody for the Te Deum as contained in Western manuscripts from the 12th century, and is presumed to be much older than that. Levy argued, on these and additional grounds, that some form of the entire Sanctus melody (through the repetition of ‘Hosanna in excelsis’) was in use from very early times as the only Sanctus melody in both Greek and Latin rites. In spite of the circumstantial nature of most of the evidence, it seems likely that the ‘melismatic arches’ for ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus’, at least, represent a 10th or 11th-century reminiscence of a – possibly the – much older universal congregational melody.
Many of the melodies in the early Western manuscripts are different in nature from such a simple congregational melody; they reflect monastic origin and (presumably) performance by a trained choir or schola, although congregational performance of the Sanctus is documented as late as the 12th century in France. The monastic repertory contains melodies with elaborately worked-out construction, both in phrase shapes and motivic detail. In that respect they recall the Kyrie and to a lesser degree the Gloria chants of the same period; but from the distribution in the sources, the Sanctus repertory seems to have been established a century later than the Gloria (10th–11th rather than 9th–10th centuries) and possibly a little later than the Kyrie as well. In addition, Sanctus melodies have their structural and stylistic idiosyncrasies, due partly to the text and partly, it seems, to musical conventions developed during the 11th century.
The Sanctus is usually set as five main phrases: ‘Sanctus …’, ‘Pleni …’, ‘Hosanna …’, ‘Benedictus …’, ‘Hosanna …’, and many of the more elaborate settings use some degree of melodic repetition or parallelism among these five phrases. Often the second ‘Hosanna’ repeats the music of the first; most interesting are the cases in which the repetition is not exact, but deliberately modified to carry out the motivic system (as in Sanctus VII/Thannabaur no.54). And in the highly structured style of the 11th and 12th centuries, absence of repetition does not mean absence of carefully controlled structure.
The phrase ‘Benedictus …’ is often set parallel to ‘Pleni …’ using the same basic line adapted to the different text. ‘Benedictus’ is longer and tends to break into two subphrases; some melodic settings put these differences to artistic advantage (Sanctus VIII/116). Sometimes the parallelism is only approximate, but the treatment is such as to suggest that the intent was to depart from a fairly firm convention of parallelism. The net effect of all these repetitions is to cast the Sanctus as a whole into an ABB plan.
The opening acclamations are parsed variously by different composers: ‘Sanctus sanctus sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth’ is frequent but alternates with other, sometimes less determinate, arrangements (as in Sanctus XV/223). The triple ‘Sanctus’ itself, regardless of the presence or absence of grouping with ‘Dominus’, is less often set as three similar melodic units (as in Levy’s proto-Sanctus), more often in some alternating fashion (ABA: Sanctus III/56) that suggests the antiphonal performance inherent in the scriptural context of the Sanctus: ‘And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy …’. In some cases, however, there is no such plan, three different settings of the word ‘Sanctus’ being subsumed under an artfully conceived longer line (Sanctus XI/202).
Elaborate motivic systems that cut across the larger phrase structure are frequent in the Sanctus repertory and are characteristic of it. Sanctus II/203 uses the same motif at the start of the first and third ‘Sanctus’, ‘Pleni’, both ‘Hosanna’, and ‘Benedictus’. Sanctus VI/17, XII/177 and XIV/184 derive subsequent material from the opening phrase in various sophisticated ways. One of the most popular Sanctus chants of the medieval repertory, Sanctus IV/49, has the effect of cycling through the same material in ever-changing configurations.
The Sanctus was provided with tropes, which often took the form of additional epithets interpolated after each ‘Sanctus’, for example (GB-Ob Bodley 775, f.72v):
Sanctus
Deus pater ingenitus;
Sanctus Filius eius unigenitus;
Sanctus Dominus Spiritus Sanctus paraclitus
ab utroque procedens Deus Sabaoth (etc.)
Such interpolations are entirely different in musical structure and effect from the highly integrated melodies of the more elaborate Kyries with Latin texts. Some Sanctus melodies were provided with extensive settings of ‘Hosanna’, and these with additional text in rhyming, scanning verses – a typically 11th–12th century product.
Polyphonic settings of the Sanctus survive from the 12th century onwards (edns in Lütolf). The separation of the Benedictus from the Sanctus and its performance at the Elevation is not known before the 16th century; this practice is reflected in many polyphonic settings.
MGG2 (C.M. Atkinson and G. Iversen)
J.A. Jungmann: Missarum sollemnia: eine genetische Erklärung der römischen Messe (Vienna, 1948, 5/1962; Eng. trans., 1951–5/R as The Mass of the Roman Rite)
M. Huglo: ‘La tradition occidentale des mélodies byzantines du Sanctus’, Der kultische Gesang, ed. F. Tack (Cologne, 1950), 40–46
K. Levy: ‘The Byzantine Sanctus and its Modal Tradition in East and West’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 7–67
P.J. Thannabaur: Das einstimmige Sanctus der römischen Messe in der handschriftlichen Überlieferung des 11. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1962)
M. Lütolf: Das mehrstimmigen Ordinarium Missae-Sätze vom ausgehenden 11. bis zur Wende des 13. zum 14. Jahrhundert (Berne, 1970)
D. Hiley: ‘Ordinary of Mass Chants in English, North French and Sicilian Manuscripts’, JPMMS, ix (1986), 1–128
G. Iversen, ed.: Corpus troporum, vii: Tropes du Sanctus (Stockholm, 1990)
B.D. Spinks: The Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer (Cambridge, 1991)
J. Boe, ed.: Beneventanum troporum corpus, ii: Ordinary Chants and Tropes for the Mass from Southern Italy, A.D. 1000–1250, pt 3: Preface Chants and Sanctus, RRMMA, xxv–xxvi (Madison, WI, 1996)
RICHARD L. CROCKER/DAVID HILEY