LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH - Harvard Glee Club, F. John Adams, director

Lamentations of Jeremiah LINER

From the Early Middle Ages, Holy Week, one of the most solemn periods of the Christian year, has provided the context for extraordinary musical events. The singing of the passion story according to the evangelists has constituted one of the best-known of these special events. The chanting of passages from the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday as part of the monastic nocturnal service of Matins has constituted another. On each of these days, three lamentation lessons are sung, the texts for which became standardized with the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century. The texts for lamentation lessons are unusual in two respects. First, each lesson ends with the non-Biblical sentence “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum," ie., Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord thy God. Second, within each lesson, all the verses are preceded by letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The retention of Hebrew letters within the context of a basically Latin text stems from the existence of an acrostic which is immediately apparent if the Lamentations of Jeremiah are read in Hebrew: a listing of the first letter of the first words of successive verses results in the Hebrew alphabet. The earliest polyphonic lamentation lessons date from the fifteenth century. Most of the great composers of Renaissance sacred music have left some settings of these specialized motets.