Mare Balticum 4

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from the Ensemble Peregrina directed by Agnieszka Budsińska-Bennett. It is on Tacet label and is S 273.

The project Mare Balticum aims to present the medieval musical heritage of the Baltic Sea region in the 12th–15th centuries. It consists of four musical programmes, prepared in great detail, and employing the newest musicological, philological, historical and organological research. Each of these programmes presents the local character of a different coastal region of Balticum, its specific historical and cultural situation, its most important saints and rulers, and the Christian roots of the relevant country. They provide an insight into the local literature and musical repertories of medieval Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and Poland; both Latin and the vernacular are represented, as well as the diversity of historical musical instruments used in those regions at the time. The project as a whole, however, aims to show something of the strong political and cultural connections between those medieval countries, their development over time, and the similarities between them, all of which are essential to our understanding of the common identity and history of Balticum, as is reflected to us through its centuries of music.

The fourth and final volume of our musical journey along the Baltic coast brings us to the northern parts of Poland and Germany: the historical region of Pomerania. Pomerania (Pommern / Pomorze) has a rich and complex political history at the intersection of several cultures. Now split between Poland and Germany, the region has historically been ruled by Polish, Saxon, and Danish conquerors, as well as often being invaded by Vikings, and later by the Teutonic Knights. It belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Poland, but also enjoyed some independence under the rule of local dynasties. The most important cities were Stralsund, Greifswald, Gdańsk (Danzig), Szczecin (Stettin) and Kołobrzeg (Kolberg), and most famous islands were Rügen (Rugia) and Wolin (Wollin), the largest islands in Germany and Poland respectively. Some Pomeranian cities joined the Hanseatic League. 

The music presented in this programme is connected to all of the above locations – with the cities of Rostock, Lübeck, and the active ecclesiastical centres on Luneburg Heath (Lüneburger Heide) in northern Germany extending the list – and resonated in local monasteries, cathedrals, and castles. Two groups of pieces are dedicated to historical figures of great importance for the Pomeranian region. Otto of Bamberg (1060/1061 –1139), known as the ‘Apostle of Pomerania’, was a German bishop who converted the region to Christianity. Chronicles describe his missionary work in the towns of Kamień (Kammin), Szczecin, and Wolin. He was canonized in 1189, and is annually commemorated on the 2nd of July with a dedicated liturgy. Presented in this recording are two mass chants from the Stargard Missal: an exuberant alleluia to his praise (10) and the sequence Gratulare sponsa Christi (11), which mentions the converted Pomeranos. Otto’s office chants are here represented by the responsory Iustum deduxit Dominus V. mmortalis (9). I was able to identify this two-part chant fragment kept in the archive of the Cistercian convent Wienhausen in northern Germany, and completed the missing material for the purpose of performance.

Three further names appear among the songs on Pomeranian rulers. Wizlav von Rügen was a Minnesinger whose work is preserved in the famous Jenaer Liederhandschrift, and who is often identified as the historically verifiable Prince Wizlav III. of Rügen († 1325). Since the third volume of the Mare Balticum cycle is dedicated to Wizlav’s songs, this programme includes only select instrumental versions of his melodies. Gunzelin III, Count of Schwerin († 1274), is commemorated by the Minnesinger Rumelant of Sachsen in the song Niht wol ich sin vergezzen mak (8), also preserved in the Jenaer Liederhandschrift. 

The poet mourns the death of the Count, while praising his virtues and generosity. Rumelant wrote yet another lament, Ir edlen herren ritter (6), which survives in the same source and bewails the death of Barnim I the Good (c. 1217/1219–1278) from the House of Griffins. This dynasty ruled the Duchy of Pomerania from the 12th century, its most prominent member being Eric of Pomerania, who became king of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway after the Kalmar Union in 1397. Barnim the Good, dux Slavorum et Cassubie (Duke of Slavs and Cassubians), managed to unite the Duchy of Pomerania under his rule. He established many towns, among them Szczecin, Stargard, Gryfino (Greifenhagen), Police (Pölitz), Goleniów (Gollnow), Pyrzyce (Pyritz), Prenzlau, and Ueckermünde; and he extended the secular reign of the Kamień bishops in the Kołobrzeg area. Rumelant praises the gracious prince “Barnam von Stetin” as a generous and kind-hearted ruler who comforted the sick and poor and “never once left the path of virtue”.

Each of Rumelant’s laments include a plea to the Mother of God that both Gunzelin and Barnim may find mercy and peace in the hereafter. The cult of the Virgin Mary, widespread throughout Europe, was also witness to local music production in cloisters, churches, and cities along the Baltic coast such as Gdańsk, Rostock, and Lübeck. In the opening section of this programme, aptly fitting the main theme of the entire Mare Balticum cycle, pieces have been selected which make use of the famous

Marian title stella maris: Star of the Sea. The image of Mary as a guiding star for seafarers was evidently popular in many Catholic coastal communities. The cantio Ave maris stella is found (with variant melodies) in the Gdańsk Cantionale and in the sixteenth-century collection Piae Cantiones printed in Greifswald in 1582. Despite its highly probable Bohemian origin, this song was particularly popular in Rostock, where the Piae Cantiones collection was published for the second time in 1625. The Gdańsk Cantionale, a manuscript from the city’s famous Marian church, also contains a late-medieval version of the eleventh-century sequence Ave preclara maris stella by Hermanus Contractus; a piece still performed (after over 400 years!) in the fifteenth century.

For the first time, we can now listen to the Ave maris stella from Lüneburg in northern Germany – a two-part motet which to my knowledge has not previously been recognised or edited. The manuscript provides only the first strophe of this well-known Marian hymn. We have extended the piece using the alternatim technique which allows for the interchange of sung and instrumental strophes.

Another set of Marian pieces, Maria rogatrix, accentuates the mediating role of the mother of Christ. The title is taken from a graceful two-part composition in the Rostocker Liederbuch (15). Rostock was presumably the home of – or at least a regular haunt of – Hermann Damen, a gifted Sangspruchdichter. His strophe Maria muoter (17) is a truly moving rogation to the Virgin Mary by a repenting sinner. Two other pieces from Lübeck, Alleluia. O virgo Maria (16) and the antiphon O flos florum (13), are prayers in which Mary is called “the truth and the way” and is asked to intercede for lost souls.

Two important liturgical feasts are also represented in this programme. Three fragments of the Bordesholmer Marienklage here made into a short medley were originally intended for dramatic performance on Good Friday. The haunting text and melodies of this fifteenth-century liturgical drama might have been well known in medieval Pomerania, since remarks on the manuscript pages suggest that it was potentially copied in the Pomeranian cloister of Augustinian friars in Jasienica (Jasenitz) near Szczecin in 1476. Christmas joy is expressed in Verbum bonum from the Gdańsk Cantionale (18), and in polyphonic pieces from the female convent of Lüne, located on the Luneburg Heath in northern Germany. The last two pieces are something of an epilogue. A fourteenth-century song from medieval Szczecin, my own birthplace, has survived only in the forms of a fragmentary facsimile and an incomplete text transcription by a nineteenth-century researcher, the original manuscript unfortunately now lost. Nonetheless, it was possible to complete the text and prepare a performance edition. The Pomeranian poet must have been familiar with the Minnesang tradition, since he makes use of a so-called nature opening (Natureingang), in which his contrasting descriptions of winter and summer reflect love’s varied expectations. The final instrumental piece, based on Wizlav’s Der herbest kumpt, alludes to the pleasures of autumn bounty, food and drink.

Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett