Ken Myers has written a wonderful post on Christmas music, emphasizing particularly how it is sung by choirs and its connection to worship in the liturgy. He includes a fascinating discussion of how music can be a contemplation of divine mysteries, as in the harmonies of this piece, “Mirabile mysterium” to this text:
“A wondrous mystery is declared today, an innovation is made upon nature; God is made man; that which he was, he remains, and that which he was not, he takes on, suffering neither commixture nor division.”
The composer is Jacob Handl (sometimes called “Gallus”), not to be confused with George Friedrich Handel. Read what Myers says about it after the jump.
The text for “Mirabile mysterium” (“Wondrous mystery”)—the antiphon to the Benedictus at lauds on the Feast of the Circumcision—is another opportunity for composers to consider how to depict marvelous abnormality: “A wondrous mystery is declared today, an innovation is made upon nature; God is made man; that which he was, he remains, and that which he was not, he takes on, suffering neither commixture nor division.”
A snappy lyric it’s not. But in the hands of Jacob Handl (1550–1591), it is an occasion to demonstrate how music can provide an experiential knowledge of realities too deep for words. In his setting of “Mirabile mysterium,” Handl uses unpredictable harmonic progressions to capture the sense that something disorienting—or better, re-orienting—is happening in the Incarnation, and thus, in the world. At the end of the work, the Latin phrase “non commixtionem passus” (“suffering no commixture”) is repeated over and over, underscoring this important Christological definition.
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