Florimond Ronger’s Vespers for Sundays in Harmonized Plainchant (1845-1854): A not so Ordinary Work
Résumé
When discussing exceptional musical arrangements for worship in the 19th century, small harmonized plainchant pieces without instrumental accompaniment are not what typically come to mind. This is hardly surprising, as this repertoire remains understudied despite constituting a significant part of church chant. The musicological historiography of this period pays little attention to the functional aspects of church music and rarely delves deeply into the relationship between the organization of sung worship and the development of its musical forms of expression. As organist of Saint-Eustache Church in Paris from 1845 to 1854, Florimond Ronger (1825–1892) composed a collection of harmonized plainchants for Sunday Vespers, now preserved at the Bibliothèque Musicale de l’Opéra. This collection reveals several indicators of exceptional musical embellishment. However, these elements become discernible only when the Ronger’s Vespers are analyzed beyond the apparent simplicity of their musical material – viewing them instead as the result of tensions between the original structure and music of Sunday Vespers chant, longstanding traditions of musical embellishment, the liturgical context, the available musical staff, and Ronger’s personal choices. To uncover and historicize these tensions, I propose a comparative study of Ronger’s Vespers alongside liturgical books from the period and earlier times, as well as data on Saint-Eustache’s musical staff. This case study offers an opportunity to shed light on an undervalued repertoire while advocating for a systematic intertwining of liturgical and musical issues in the study of religious musicology for the contemporary era.
