“With this CD you are transported into the basilica of Marienstatt Abbey,” writes Abbot Thomas Denter in his foreword. The recordings of the monks’ choral office are meant to commemorate the founding of the mother house of Cîteaux in 1098 and to give visitors to the services a memento to take home. Because the monks see the praise of God and intercession for the whole world as their noblest task, the abbey chose “live” rather than “artistic” recordings. They were made on 14 and 15 and on 20 and 21 August 1997; the musical concept was devised by Fr. Jakob Schwinde.
In Denter’s words, the chants and texts of the two solemnities express the Cistercian character particularly well: Mary is the patroness of the order and the abbey, Bernard of Clairvaux the spiritual father of the order. From the feast of St Bernard, after the festive peal of bells, First Vespers is heard from the entrance through four antiphons with their psalms, the reading and Great Responsory “Beatus Bernardus”, the hymn “Bernardus doctor inclytus” and the Magnificat to the procession with the Salve regina; to this is added the Alleluia “Charitate vulneratus” of the Mass. The author of the Bernard hymn sought to write a “hymn of hymns” for the father of the order: the last line of each verse is the opening line of a well-known hymn of the church year.
From the solemnity of the Assumption come the Invitatory of the Vigil with Psalm 94, the Alleluia and Communion of the Mass and parts of Second Vespers. Marienstatt is also a place of Marian pilgrimage: every day at the end of Vespers the monks go in a “little pilgrimage” to the miraculous image of the Sorrowful Mother of God to sing the Salve regina there, and in Compline the community closes the day with the Salve regina in the Cistercian tone before the Angelus is prayed as the bell rings. Three improvisations for flute and organ by Fr. Jakob Schwinde and Fr. Gregor Brandt are devoted to the Vespers hymn and the Alleluia of the feast of St Bernard, to the Communion of the Assumption and to the Cistercian Salve regina; like the high choir window of the basilica, the second seeks to depict the hand of God reaching down and drawing Mary up to itself.
The monks sing from the chant books that the Trappists reconstructed at the end of the 19th century on the basis of the old Cistercian “Normalkodex” and published from 1899 onwards. This codex went back to the chant reform initiated by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1134: the range of a melody was not to exceed ten notes, a chant was not to mix several modes, and long runs of notes over one syllable were shortened. For the organ accompaniment the monks sometimes use, partly on this CD too, settings by P. Dominikus Pamler (1868–1955) of Marienstatt and P. Raymund van Husen (1908–1989) of Himmerod. The abbey itself was founded from Heisterbach in 1215 and resettled by Austrian Cistercians in 1888 after the secularisation.