The Monastery of Einsiedeln

Turns out the Hotel Appensellerhof has free Wi-Fi which works, so I will blog some about the rest of my day. (Those who want to see more pictures, don't worry. I will download pictures of today from someone else's digital camera - we checked the connection and it works (I had the cord with me during the day), but she went to bed so I will have to do it tommorow AND my camera will be up and running tommorrow as it will be all charged up so I will be able to take pictures of St. Gall, which we visit tommorow.)

In the afternoon we went to the Benedictine Monastery of Einsiedeln which is about a two hours drive from the hotel we are staying in now. (Incidentally the name of the previous hotel "Hotel Mohren" is from "Die Drei Mohren" - "the three moors," what the Germans call the three kings or the Magi. Anyway there is a carving of them on the cathedral door at Konstanz which dates from 1470 and was carved by one Simon Haider I believe. I will try to include a picture. It was spared distruction by Zwingli's people for some reason who destroyed quite a few of the original altars at the time of the Calvinist Uprising.) Anyway, we had a tour of Einsiedeln given by Fr. Renz - a long time monk of the Abbey - who was very knowledgable and spoke English. It is an exquisitely beautiful-and stylistically unified-Baroque/Roccoco Abbey built in the early 1700's. The abbey itself dates from 934 AD and was founded by St. Meinrad, however they had outgrown the original building so it was torn down and this "newer" structure was built. I am not completely certain, but I think that Fr. Renz said that the architect was a pupil of Bernini's - who, of course, planned the new St. Peter's in Rome. (I am not sure if the time line is right, or maybe the initial sketches happened many years before they began building.)

At any rate, the center piece of the Abbey -from the standpoint of Gregorian Chant- is the Codex 321 (I may have the number wrong). This is often simply known as "Einsiedeln." It is the red colored line of those 9th century neumes in the modern day Graduale Triplex above the square note notation. The book, a small hand-holdable one (not like the later huge medieval chant books), consists of only the Graduals (not the Introit, Alleluia, Offertory or Communio) and eight sequences: words and the early neumes ("in campo aperto" - in an open field, i.e. without a staff). This was clearly a book of reference for the early Gregorian cantor, to jog his memory when he would forget some of the more complicated graduals which he and others learned by memory. (It only shows that the notes go up or down, or are repeated, etc., but not the specific pitches) What is significant about it is that it has many expressive signs in it. (the St. Gall manuscript is another) The semiologists make hay of this, but there are two problems: 1) there is still considerable dispute about what all the signs mean and, 2) it was their local interpretation of the chant in the 9th century - which, if some of the interpretations are correct, and parts of them almost certainly are, it is quite virtuosic.

The whole point of the modern Solesmes method as developed by Dom Mocquereau/Dom Gajard was to give a uniform, clear interpretation that was musical and yet respected the received chants as best as possible - and could be done by good amateurs. Often people who did not rehearse together regularly - and even those who got together at a moments notice (e.g. at a convention or festival Mass.) It is kind of a lingua franca, or standard English, or "Hoch Deutsch." I think about Charlemagne and what he tried to achieve uniting his empire - with a common Missal, and the development of the miniscule script (which Reichenau Abbey was the biggest diseminator of at the time) and how unity is created and culture advance by these things. And then I think about how semiologists have kind of busted that up - they don't even agree with each other - in their elusive attempts to restore the absolute "pure" 9th century chant interpretation.

End of rant.

But the manuscript is interesting and, of course, Dom Mocquereau consulted it in his researches.