Veni, Veni

Two Hymns for the Season Of Waiting

The Wintry Cathedral

During a late December evening in the eighth century, a cold winter wind howls outside against the thick stone walls of the cathedral, while inside a serious stillness prevails. The smell of pale incense infuses the bone-chilling air of the vaulted chapel, and a group of monks gather and sing a haunting, contemplative chant in unison. The sound of their desperate cry echoes through the wooden stalls and thick glass windows, as they solemnly sing in Latin, “O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, Hope of the Gentiles, and their Saviour; Come and save us, O Lord our God.”

Hope Awaited

Long before carols and even before Christianity, an ancient Hebrew verb encapsulated the theme of hope awaited. Qavah can be translated to both “wait” and “hope,” and there is a tradition that reads the root as ‘to bind together, twist, or stretch.’ The physical metaphor is the process of making a rope by twisting strands of material together, creating structural tension. The season of Advent carries this tension to the present day, as it is a period of waiting and of “not yet.” The posture of this awaited hope does something different from all other forms of hope. It stands still. It waits in the dark, facing the direction from which light is expected. This waiting is the active, agonizing discipline of enduring the space between a promise being made and a promise being fulfilled.

A Missing Source

Sung through Advent, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” lives in the dark stretch between a promise made and a promise kept. This tune did not originate as a song of waiting for a birth. When Anglican priest John Mason Neale and musical editor Thomas Helmore published “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” with its now familiar melody in The Hymnal Noted, Part II (1856), it actually began with the words, “Draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel.” Emmanuel means “God with us,” and is the name given to Jesus Christ as the divine presence dwelling among humanity. Neale and Helmore described the tune’s source as, “From a French Missal in the National Library, Lisbon,” but subsequent investigations failed to find the original source of the tune, leading to speculation that the tune might have been adapted from other sources or invented outright.

For a century, musicologists debated the authenticity of the tune’s origins, until 1966 when Mother Thomas More (Mary Berry) discovered a 15th-century processional manuscript in Paris that had belonged to French Franciscan nuns. One of the texts in this collection, “Bone iesu dulcis cunctis,” included a funeral chant which matched the melody of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The tune the English-speaking world now associates with the coming of Christ’s birth was originally a funeral chant to sing for a dead body. A song of waiting made musicologists wait a century to find its true source.

Seven Cries, One Answer

While the origin of the words of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is less controversial, they do involve reaching back more than a thousand years of musical history. The text which Neale translated and adapted comes from the “O Antiphons,” a series of seven (although sometimes more) plainchant prayers that have been sung in Western monasteries since at least the 8th century. These seven great cries of longing invoke Christ by a different Messianic title; Sapientia (Wisdom), Adonai (Lord), Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), Clavis David (Key of David), Oriens (Dayspring), Rex Gentium (King of Nations), Emmanuel (God with Us), and each one ends with the same urgent imperative: “Come.” These Antiphons are still performed today, and they are sung during the final seven evenings of Advent preceding Christmas Eve (December 17 through 23). To sing them is to practice waiting as a daily discipline. The initials of the seven titles, read in reverse (Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, and Sapientia), form the acrostic ERO CRAS, which means “Tomorrow, I will come,” or “Tomorrow, I will be [there]”. This phrase foretells the coming birth of Christ and serves as a direct response to the repeated liturgical cries of Veni (“Come”) throughout the text of the Antiphons. It is unclear if this acrostic was intentional, but it is a quiet liturgical device underscoring the anticipation of Christ’s coming.

The Mode That Will Not Resolve

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is the music of exile and longing. Its medieval plainchant origins render the song without a strong pulse driving towards a downbeat. The tune drifts throughout, resisting any attempt to force it into a fixed meter. While modern hymn arrangements set the song in minor, it mostly functions in the Dorian mode which serves as a modal bridge between major and minor tonalities. The Dorian mode lacks a leading tone, which provides the listener with harmonic gravity before a satisfying resolution to the home chord. Without this leading tone, the music keeps stretching the tension. This is qavah in modal form. The song never quite resolves in a traditional way. That withholding feels like an unresolved weight, deepening the longing. The refrain begins with the word “Rejoice!” as a response of assurance on two bright major chords that briefly lift the music before a quick return to the modal ambiguity. This oscillation between the ache of longing and the brief light of the promise breaking in is the already and the “not yet” rendered as sound.

From Branch to Flower

In a different tradition and a different millennium, another song took root in the same soil of waiting. Centuries after the “O Antiphons” named Jesus as O Radix Jesse, or O Root of Jesse, a German carol watched that root bloom. The text for “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen,” otherwise known as “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” first appeared in print in the late 16th century. The text’s authorship and exact date are unknown, although it may have originated as early as the 15th century. Early printed versions of the German hymn featured up to twenty-three stanzas, and the text was an unambiguously Catholic devotional in which the rose was the Virgin Mary. On the cusp of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the European population and was partially due to the religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, a Lutheran Kapellmeister would take the hymn and change it dramatically.

Michael Praetorius was a leading German scholar and composer of the early 17th century, and he altered the text for “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” as a Protestant devotional which points the rose to Christ, and includes only two stanzas. He also composed a four-part SATB setting for the song, which he published as part of his monumental collection of over 1,200 settings in the Musae Sioniae (Muses of Zion) in 1609. The song was shared and sung across confessional lines with different theological readings, and it became canonical in both Catholic and Protestant hymnals.

Praetorius’s harmonization for “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” became the standard for subsequent renditions and is commonly used today. While the setting is in a major key, the melody still retains its modal, stepwise contour, which keeps the music contemplative and calm. The setting reflects the Lutheran values of clarity and balance, and placing the melody in the soprano (rather than the older tenor line as was tradition) makes congregational singing easier. Similar to “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” presents a notational ambiguity, as the phrasing alternates between duple and triple groupings, producing a gentle lilt throughout. Praetorius also adds suspensions which hold the resolution open longer than the ear expects, building acoustical friction, and twisting the musical cord before finally resolving. This is qavah in harmonic form.

Conclusion

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is the sound a church makes while it waits. “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” promises a rose which buds “amid the cold of winter, when half-spent was the night.” One hope hymn is built on a chant for the dead. The other holds a flower grown from a cut-down stump. The Antiphon names the root, and the carol watches it bloom in the cold. Both of these songs contain remarkable depth and complexity, and are built around expectation and promise. They are both patient and geological in their sense of time. The waiting that matters most is always the one at the threshold, in the dark, where the light has been promised and has not yet arrived. These two songs symbolize the necessary tension of waiting during the “not yet,” which makes us feel like the rope being stretched.

Hope awaited is qavah.

Sources and Further Reading

The Liturgical Year: Vol. 1. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany by Adrien Nocent. A theological and pastoral breakdown of the liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.

The Carols of Christmas: A Celebration of the Surprising Stories Behind Your Favorite Holiday Songs by Andrew Gant. An account of the the history behind many Christmas carols.

The New Oxford Book of Carols edited by Andrew Parrott and Hugh Keyte. An expansive collection of Christmas carols with notes on historical background and performance.

Listen Along – Recommended Playlist

Listen to “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” in English and Latin, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” in English and German, and a version of the ancient “O Antiphons.”