Joseph Pothier
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Dom Joseph Pothier OSB (born December 7, 1835 in Bouzemont , France , † December 8, 1923 in the Conques Monastery, Sainte-Cécile, Florenville in Belgium ) was a French Benedictine , abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille and researcher of Gregorian chant .
Life as a monk and chorale researcher
After studying at the seminary of Châtel-sur-Moselle and the seminary of Saint-Dié , where he stayed until his ordination on December 18, 1858, Pothier entered the Benedictine abbey of St. Pierre de Solesmes in 1859 .
There he was entrusted with the further research and restoration of the Gregorian chant , which the abbot of the monastery, Dom Prosper-Louis-Pascal Guéranger , had already begun on July 15, 1860, i.e. still as a novice , together with Dom Paul Jausions .
He strived for the most authentic possible interpretation of Gregorian chant for his monastery. For this he had already postulated in his Institutions liturgiques in 1840 the principles that such restitution would have to follow; his method, which he wrote with in Le Mans making canons Augustin-Mathurin Gontier had developed, was published in 1859. Gontier had greater emphasis placed on the practical aspects of the execution of the piece, Guéranger the importance of the restoration of Georgian heritage original in his Emphasizes purity. These two aspects of the restoration of the chant should remain the determining factors for Pothier's work.
"The principle on which one had to rely in this work was formulated by Abbot Guéranger in the words:" As soon as manuscripts from different countries and times agree in one version, one can be sure to have found the Gregorian melody movement. " [...] The learned abbot, who knew well that the choir books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not be reprinted without a serious revision and without prior studies, commissioned two of his monks with the necessary preparatory work. The oldest manuscripts were therefore examined and compared with the later ones, and by applying the principle given by Guéranger and cited above, the result was that all pieces of the Gregorian melody collection are intact in the manuscripts written before the sixteenth century, very often notes to get grade, group to group [...]. This confirmation of a fact [...] left no doubt: it is necessary to reintroduce this Gregorian tradition into life both for melody and for execution. "
While Jausions then copied the first pure neumen manuscripts from a missal ( manuscript 91 (83)) available in the Angers city library from spring 1862 to 1867 , Pothier began to copy the neumen manuscripts from Codex Sangallensis 359 in the abbey library, which had already been published by Louis Lambillotte in 1851 St. Gallen , which contained neumes that were significantly older than those from Angers. Convinced of the unbroken tradition between adiasthematic and diasthematic codices, Pothier compared the melodic version of the St. Gallen Codex with that of lined codices. The apparent successes of this practice earned him the reputation of a champollion of neumes .
Between 1866 and 1867 the two monks recorded the results of their research work and their interpretation of the traditional Gregorian chant in writing and justified the method they had established from a musicological point of view. Dom Jausions limited himself primarily to questions relating to the treatment of the Latin text.
Dom Guéranger hesitated, however, to publish these results, all of which he approved of; Five years after his death, Joseph Pothier edited it under the title Les Mélodies grégoriennes ,
"At the same time with improvements and additions, which he [Guéranger] himself stated for the most part."
The publication date of this work marked a milestone in the history of the restoration of Gregorian chant.
For Dom Guéranger, the restoration of two choral collections was particularly urgent: that of the gradual , which contains the chorale of the proprium and the ordinarium of the mass , and that of the antiphonale , which contains the pieces used in the liturgy of the hours . Abbot Guèranger and Dom Jausions selected the manuscripts on which the research was based; Dom Pothier was responsible for developing a definitive melody for the individual pieces.
To this end, he went on extensive journeys, which led him to the storage locations of the most important Gregorian manuscripts, of which he made copies, studied them and compared them with one another. In 1865 these trips led to St. Gallen , Laon , Colmar and Epinal , in 1866 again to Colmar and Laon, then on to Munster in Alsace , Basel and Troyes . His outstanding intelligence, his lively mind, his enormous overview of all questions relating to Gregorian chant and his astonishingly quick apprehension, which made him recognize almost all details at first glance, were soon legendary.
From 1867 onwards, Dom Jausions turned more and more away from studying the historical manuscripts of Gregorian chant, making this the real domain of Dom Pothier.
He anticipated the results of his research in a gradual that he sent to Benedikt Sauter , monk of the Archabbey of Beuron and later cantor of this monastery, who had spent a year in Solesmes. This gradual was corrected according to the best manuscripts and was intended to allow the Beuron monks to use the Gregorian chant in their monastery in a “rational, sensible, harmonious” way, i.e. H. according to the principles formulated for this purpose in Solesmes.
Work on the Liber Gradualis was completed in 1869.
Pothier also created new melodies. His way of singing to Salve mater misericordiae is sung in Germany with the text Gruß dir, Mutter, in God's glory .
As a monk, Pothier was sent to the Ligugé monastery as prior in 1893 , and in 1895 he was prior in the Saint Wandrille monastery, where he was appointed 1st abbot of (New) Saint-Wandrille in 1898 . In 1901 he moved with the convent from France to Belgium to the Conques monastery and in 1903 was appointed president of a papal commission for the preparation of authentic choral books by Pope Pius X. As chairman of this commission, Dom Pothier lived in Rome from 1904 to 1913 .
During his abbate , the Abbey of St. Wandrille founded a new monastery in Canada in 1912 , later the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac in Québec .
Dom Pothier died in Conques Convent in 1923.
Works
- Les mélodies grégoriennes d'après la tradition , repr. D. Edition Tournai, Impr.liturgique de Saint Jean, 1880, Olms, Hildesheim New York, 1982 ISBN 3-487-07199-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vulgate Psalm 24, 1
- ↑ Gotteslob (1975) No. 586; Gotteslob (2013) Diocesan Annexes
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pothier, Joseph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French religious, abbot of Saint-Wandrille Abbey and researcher of Gregorian chant |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 7, 1835 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bouzemont |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 8, 1923 |
| Place of death | Florenville |