THESAURUS LITANIARUM: THE SYMBOLISM AND PRACTICE OF MUSICAL LITANIES IN COUNTER-REFORMATION GERMANY

Abstract

A venerable form of petitionary prayer, the litany emerged as a key aural expression of Counter-Reformation Catholicism around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in the confessionally contested borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire. Its explicit projection of the dogma of sanctoral intercession, rejected soundly by Protestant theologians, helped to make the litany a flashpoint for religious controversy. Especially in the duchy of Bavaria, the northern bastion of the Counter-Reformation, the litany flourished in a wide variety of monophonic and polyphonic forms that reflected its fluid position on a spectrum between oral and written traditions. This essay explores the usage and significance of the litany in Counter-Reformation Germany, focusing especially upon the Thesaurus litaniarum (Treasury of Litanies, 1596) by Georg Victorinus, music director of the Munich Jesuits. Intimately connected with currents of Catholic reform in German-speaking lands, this great anthology illustrates the varied and creative ways in which composers responded to the litany’s distinctive ebb and flow of titles and petitions to holy intercessors.

Music and Domestic Devotion in the Age of Reform

“…The story transformed Loreto into an important pilgrimage site, and from the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Jesuits were placed in charge of it, the popularity of the Litany spread both North and South of the Alps. 38 In the home, as in the parish church or in the street during processions, the most common method of singing the litany would have been antiphonal, with each invocation being intoned by the leader of the group gathered around the family image of the Virgin, while the response 'ora pro nobis' was then sung by the rest of those present according to an extremely short simple melodic formula. In practice, the singing of a number of textually distinct litanies would have been familiar from a number of different contexts, both domestic and public.…”