St. Nicholas, a bishop of Myra in the fourth century, captured the imaginations of many writers and composers from the high Middle Ages through the Renaissance. This alleluia verse appears as part of the Mass for St. Nicholas in two confraternity manuscripts from northern France: Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 464 (F-Pm 464), for the Confraternity of the Spice Dealers and Apothecaries in Paris; and B-Tc A 13, for the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Tournai cathedral (see chapter 1). The text calls upon him for protection from “fevers that cause a death that is everlasting,” a reference to the plague, which was seen as God's wrath on earth. It also alludes to one of his most celebrated virtues, as St. Nicholas was, according to legend, a myroblyte, whose relics were believed to secrete a holy oil, or myrrh, with healing attributes. For this reason, his popularity grew in Western Europe after the theft of his relics from Myra and their relocation to Bari in 1087. From this point on, St. Nicholas became one of the most widely venerated saints of the Catholic Church, and his feast was normally celebrated at the high rank of duplex in cathedrals and parishes in northern France. He also assumed an important role in devotions among the laity, becoming the subject of miracle plays and the patron saint of countless groups of people, including students and scholars, children, those seeking to become pregnant, merchants, and sailors. This resulted in the hundreds of devotional and trade confraternities adopting St. Nicholas as their patron, making these communities a driving force in the creation of new music and text in his honor.

In this chapter, I explore new masses and offices focused on healing narratives for the Translation of the Relics of St. Nicholas and the Finding of the Relics of St. Catherine of Alexandria, which appear exclusively in Parisian confraternity manuscripts.

The following images and tables show the gathering structures for the three manuscripts used by the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Cathedral of Tournai. Each hand has been given a name such as Scribe A, Scribe B, etc., based on the order in which they appear in each book. Therefore, scribes that are common among all three sources will be called something different in all three inventories.

This appendix records all the manuscript and printed liturgical books referred to in this study. Each source is assigned a number that corresponds to those used in the comparison tables throughout the chapters and appendices. This appendix only includes liturgical books and others that contain texts, or chant and polyphony for the Mass and Office. It does not include the confraternity registers, chronicles, hagiographical works, and other archival collections referenced throughout the study.

• 1 B-Br Inc. A 545—Misse solempniores. Printed in Paris by Michel de Toulouze, ca. 1500.

• 2 B-Br 3782—Missal from the diocese of Liège with music only for the Mass ordinary, early sixteenth century.

• 3 B-Br 6434—Antiphoner for a Franciscan community, diocese of Liège, sixteenth century.

• 4 B-Br 11396—Gradual from the Abbey of Tongerlo, fourteenth century.

• 5 B-Gu 15—Antiphoner from the Abbey of St. Bavo in Ghent, fifteenth century.

• 6 B-Lsc 1—Antiphoner (winter) for the Church of Ste. Croix in Liège, 1333–34.

• 7 B-Lsc 2—Antiphoner (summer) for the Church of Ste. Croix in Liège, 1333–34.

• 8 B-Tc A 10—Notated missal for the usage of the Tournai cathedral (before ca. 1265).

• 9 B-Tc A 11—Notated missal for the usage of Tournai cathedral ca. 1265.

• 10 B-Tc A 12—Antiphoner and gradual used by the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Cathedral of Tournai, thirteenth through sixteenth centuries.

• 11 B-Tc A 13—Gradual used by the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Cathedral of Tournai, thirteenth through sixteenth centuries.

• 12 B-Tc A 27—Gradual used by the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Cathedral of Tournai, thirteenth through sixteenth centuries.

• 13 B-Tc A 28—Tonary for the usage of the Tournai cathedral, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

• 14 B-Tc A 58—Antiphoner, gradual, and processional used by the Confraternity of the Notaries at the Cathedral of Tournai, fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

• 15 B-TOb 63—Antiphoner for the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Tongeren, ca. 1375–1400.

• 16 B-TOb 64—Antiphoner for the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk in Tongeren, ca. 1375–1400.

• 17 B-Ts Inc. 27—Missale insignis ecclesie Tornacensis. Printed in Paris by Johannes Higman, 1498.

• 18 B-Tv 12—Notated missal used in a chapel at the Tournai cathedral, early fourteenth century.

This sequence text, which first appeared at the end of a fifteenth-century notated missal used in Paris, is a plea to St. Sebastian. Although the saint is not mentioned by name, it is one of several similar texts set to music that appear in manuscripts containing votive masses for him. It is a personal, direct appeal for the saint to intervene and protect his supplicants from one of the most devastating illnesses to affect Western Europe in the Middle Ages: the bubonic plague. The medieval laity believed that such settings served as vehicles to carry their words directly to these protective figures, and through them to God.

Plague epidemics affected everyone, forcing men and women of all walks of life to come face to face with their mortality. The disease first appeared in Western Europe in 1347, recurring every ten to fifteen years until well into the eighteenth century, and had a profound effect on the populace. For instance, before 1433, the city of Paris had a population of approximately two hundred fifty thousand people, but between 1433 and 1444, a mere decade, the plague took the lives of over forty-eight thousand Parisians. This is a rather large figure for a late-medieval urban population. One can imagine a certain helplessness that people felt when confronted with this disease, causing them to routinely seek divine intervention from patron saints thought to have special protective powers.

St. Sebastian was viewed as one of the most powerful protectors from the plague in northern France from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, but he was not alone. He was one of a group of saints called the fourteen holy helpers, who were commonly invoked for protection against sickness and death in the region. St. Barbara, St. Nicholas of Myra, and St. Catherine of Alexandria were all thought to protect one against an untimely death, as was the Virgin Mary

The opening of the text above is easily recognizable as that of the Sanctus, which is sung year-round as part of the Mass ordinary. The added words in italics are a trope text that was included with the chant in B-Tc A 58, a manuscript used by the Confraternity of the Transfiguration in Tournai. This troped Sanctus is known as the Sanctus “Vineux;” it alludes to the metamorphosis of Christ, commonly known as his Transfiguration, on Mount Thabor before the disciples Peter, James, and John. Although the Transfiguration was long celebrated as a feast in the Eastern Church, it only became offi-cially recognized in the Western Church in 1457 (celebrated on August 6). It was not a common theme in popular devotions among the laity before the early decades of the fifteenth century but was celebrated in clerical circles like the Confraternity of the Transfiguration before 1457. This organization consisted exclusively of priests and chaplains who held benefices at the Tournai cathedral.

The Sanctus “Vineux” is a good example of a work appearing in a number of sources that could illustrate personal connections between confraternities, ecclesiastical communities, and composers. The original melody is written in cantus fractus and also appears as the tenor of two polyphonic settings—one by Guillaume Du Fay and one by his presumed teacher, Richard de Locqueville—in the manuscript I-Bc Q 15. In this source, the word “Vineux” appears after an inscription just before the polyphonic setting by Locqueville: “Sanctus vineux secundum Locqueville.” It is also indicated with the name “Vineux” in several manuscripts where it appears in cantus fractus, implying that “Vineux” applies specifically to the monophonic tenor.

A first version of this essay was written in Paris in January 2020, a few weeks before the brutal disruption of everyday life caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This is how it began:

Predictions are always risky, be they grounded on science, on belief, or on tradition. They are especially risky for historians, who are supposed to be experts on the past, or rather, on a small part of it. On the other hand, the future tense in these opening sentences did not indicate an exercise in prophecy or in phenomenological protention, but a trivial reality of cultural life, namely, the fact that a commemoration of this kind always follows a long pre-established program.

For humanity, the sudden cancellation of Beethoven concerts, exhibitions, and conferences looks insignificant compared to so many catastrophes. Yet it is as good a spot as any to take the pulse of the random and dangerous reformatting of historicity in which humans are presently engaged. As the present second version of this essay is being written, in May 2020, some scholarly events are going virtual, and most concerts are being rescheduled. If this pattern holds, the disruption might eventually boil down to a chronological anomaly, with 2021 doubling for 2020.

The present publication was designed to accompany an exhibition mounted by the Paul Sacher Foundation at the invitation of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. As the Foundation's research archive centers on music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and as its holdings largely comprise collections and posthumous estates from composers (plus a few performer collections), it was logical to focus on the reception of Beethoven among composers of the last one-hundred-twenty years. The book thus deals with the manner in which artists have engaged creatively with Beethoven – with his music, his ideas, and everything his name has stood and continues to stand for. In contrast, the other two principal modes of musical reception – analysis and performance – are touched on only peripherally, the first in the form of a few verbal documents from composers, the latter in the form of sources for a Beethoven adaptation by Cathy Berberian. Although both these areas are represented in the Foundation's holdings by quite interesting manuscripts and recordings, they do scant justice to the wide-ranging spectrum of recent Beethoven interpretations and performance traditions. Another reason for limiting ourselves to the reception of Beethoven by composers was that the spatial restrictions at the Beethoven-Haus made it clear from the outset that ours would be a smallscale showcase exhibition.

Even within these limitations, however, the subject still remains vast. Although Beethoven's impact was most immediate in the nineteenth century, countless composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have grappled with him in a great many ways. It is all the more striking, then, that the subject is not nearly as well-researched as one might expect. True, much has been written about the verbal and imaginative ties to Beethoven, our changing image of Beethoven, and the various ways in which he has been politically and ideologically co-opted. We need only mention three earlier “classics”: Arno Schmitz's monograph on the Romantic image of Beethoven, Leo Schrade's study of Beethoven in France, and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht's exhaustive investigation of writings on Beethoven. But to the present day, only halting attempts have been made to produce a broad-based study of Beethoven's reception among twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers that goes beyond isolated figures or pieces.

Nor does our book, being limited to the archival holdings of the Paul Sacher Foundation, seek to create such a larger picture.

Some 150 years lie between Johannes Brahms's quip to conductor Hermann Levi – “You can't have any idea what it's like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!”– and John Adams's confession: “Having Beethoven in the car while you are driving is exhilarating and terrifying and very humbling.” And yet, Franz Schubert's famous question notwithstanding (“[W]ho can do anything after Beethoven?”), generations of composers have done one thing above all else: they have composed music, even and especially if it meant engaging with Beethoven. The reasons why his music has been so uniquely important to subsequent generations is neatly summarized by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: “In each of his major works, Beethoven invents new categories of music altogether. We find novel and previously unknown procedures and approaches whose ground-breaking qualities came to fruition only in the heyday of modern music […]. There is hardly anything that Beethoven hasn't already considered, hardly any problems whose solution his music hasn't already prefigured.”

If Beethoven can function as a point of reference on such a scale for almost any form of composition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the range of strategies for referring to his music is virtually limitless. Almost every compositional technique could be shown in one way or another to derive from Beethoven, and the only way to refer to him explicitly would be through titles, explanatory notes, documented quotations, or the like. Beethoven is omnipresent, all-powerful, almost inescapable. To quote Steffen Schleiermacher, any attempt to approach a “great composer from the past is always a difficult business. Today, if you want to rise above blatant quotation and avoid the absurd temptation to compose ‘… in the style of …’, you quickly reach your limits as a composer. […] On the other hand, perhaps the most honest way of approaching the great composer– simply writing the best piece you can and dedicating it to him– is unavailable owing to the danger of arbitrariness. So how to proceed?”