Il segreto del quattrocento boemo: Where has gone Czech singing of the second half of the fifteenth century?
Abstract
There is a consensus among historians and musicologists that the Hussite Reformation in the Czech lands in the 15th century brought the first translation of the liturgy into the vernacular. It anticipated liturgical reforms in the rest of Europe by almost a hundred years.
When we talk about the Czech Hussite liturgy, we usually mean the Jistebnice cantional, which dates from around 1430. However, the existence of vernacular chant in the second half of the 15th century is not yet supported by musical and liturgical sources.
It is generally believed that after the rise of the radical concept of singing in intelligible language, a conservative approach to liturgy prevailed in the second half of the 15th century, which meant the return of Latin chant. However, there are sufficient references to the use of Czech in worship throughout the 15th century in polemical and narrative texts.
Where, then, has Czech chant gone? Are these testimonies just a theoretical and ideological framework, or has there been such a massive loss of sources? The solution seems to be a new "mapping of the terrain" of liturgical practice in the Czech lands, that is, an effort to better define the participation of the individual actors (priest - cantor and pupils - individual participant) and their linguistic input. The paper will try to describe this terrain and find a place of Czech liturgical singing in it.