Learning the Victimae paschali for Easter

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Learning the Victimae paschali for Easter

In only a couple of weeks now we will have reached Easter. As well as getting back the Gloria and the Alleluias (still sadly shorn of their exclamation mark), there is a particular extra bit of liturgy for Easter Sunday Mass.

It comes after the Second Reading and before the Alleluia-before-the-Gospel. It is of course the Victimae paschali. This is one of the “Sequences” that occur at various points in the Church’s year. Others include the Veni, Sancte Spiritus at Pentecost, and the Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem at Corpus Christi, which is where Panis angelicus comes from.

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Lenten music: deafness, hearing and listening

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Lenten Music: deafness, hearing and listening

One of the recurring ways to identify Jesus as the Messiah is the healings he causes to happen as he is going about in Galilee during the brief period of his public life, and we are hearing about some of these in our Lent readings.

They made him both popular with the people and unpopular with the authorities.  As the Gospel writers keep pointing out, these cures are what the prophets promised centuries before: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing” (Isaiah 35:5) – and if you’re an English singer, that’s the form you remember it in, because Handel set it to music in Messiah, and he used the King James Version. It’s only a piece of recitative, in an oratorio packed with beautiful arias, but it always makes the hair rise on the back of my neck, because it’s so exciting, and the final “So there!” cadence sounds even more of a challenge than usual

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