Maundy Thursday

Thursday, April 1, 2021

Today, Maundy Thursday, marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three holy days of the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, and thus the climax of Holy Week. Traditionally, in the Roman Catholic liturgy, the organ plays for the last time in the Gloria of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper and then remains silent until the Gloria of the Easter Vigil. Nevertheless, a look into our database also suggests that the musical realization of the masses in Holy Week has been extremely variegated.

You can find musical sources for Maundy Thursday by using the Advanced Search of the RISM online catalog. Select the option “Liturgical festival”, and enter “Cena Domini, Feria V. in” (according to Liber usualis) into the respective search field.

The most common Maundy Thursday responsories include:
Amicus meus
Ecce vidimus eum
Eram quasi agnus innocens
In monte Oliveti
Judas mercator
Seniores populi
Tristis est anima mea
Una hora
Unus ex discipulis

The three Lamentations for Maundy Thursday are as follows:
Incipit lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae (320 sources, including Palestrina’s and Allegri’s settings 60 times)
Vau et egressus est (172 sources, including Palestrina’s setting 19 times)
Jod manum suam (174 sources, including Palestrina’s setting 14 times)

Image: Title page from Giuseppe Antonio Silvanis (1672-1728), Sacri responsorii per li tre giorni della Settimana Santa (copy from D-Dl Mus.2198.E.1)

Share Tweet Email

Category: Events


Browse the news archive by category below or use the search box above.

Categories

Top posts

- Joseph Bologne’s “L’Amant Anonyme”
- The Public Domain in 2023
- Scott Joplin and the St. Louis World’s Fair
- The Vienna State Opera in 1955
- Elizaveta, Elisabeth, and Elizabeth

Featured posts

- A Word about RISM
- Chopin Heritage in Open Access
- Sarah Levy
- Discovering Vivaldi Sources
- Finding Unica in RISM

Send us your news

Share your news with RISM and reach an international community of scholars, musicians, librarians, and archivists. Find out more here.

Copyright

All news posts are by RISM Editorial Center staff unless otherwise noted. Reuse of RISM’s own texts is permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In all other cases, please contact the individual author.

CC_license