Today the Abbey of Jouques celebrates the Solemnity of its Patron Saint, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. On this day, the Church honours Mary and her incomparable sorrows, especially those she felt at the foot of the Cross at the moment of the consummation of the mystery of our Redemption. To illustrate the sorrows of the Virgin Mother, painters depict her Heart pierced by seven swords, symbolising the seven principal sorrows of the Mother of God – the God who crowned her Queen of Martyrs.

Twice during the year, the Church commemorates the sorrows of the Blessed Virgin: in Passion Week and also today, 15 September. In the Middle Ages there was a popular devotion to the five joys of the Virgin Mother, and around the same time this devotion was supplemented by another feast in honour of her five sorrows during the Passion. Later, the sorrows of the Virgin Mary were increased to seven, and comprised not only her march to Calvary, but her entire life. 

To celebrate this solemnity, we at Neumz have chosen the Offertory chant, Recordare Virgo Mater. This chant is taken from the second verse of the Offertory Recordare mei. The text is taken from the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 18, verse 20. It is the prophet himself who addresses God, asking him to turn his wrath away from his people. A few strokes of the pen are enough to make Jeremiah's plea a beautiful prayer to Mary, after listening to the account in John's Gospel in which Jesus presents her to us as our mother. Therefore, in this Offertory hymn the Church raises her prayer to the one who defends our causes before God and his son, the intercessor of Humanity who presents all the love and goodness in us as a plea against evil, against the darkness that we sometimes cultivate. Mary, Mother of Humanity, has a divine motherhood that possesses infinite mercy, hence the immeasurable strength of her intercession that the Church implores.

As for the melody, it is that of the second verse of the Offertory mentioned above. It is a chant, composed in mode 1, of great beauty, very peaceful and full of tender confidence, which gradually becomes livelier until it reaches the tone of an intense supplication charged with strong emotion. This Offertory begins with an incisive repetition of Recordare and Virgo Mater: full of fervour, graceful but restrained, a certain gravity pervades this passage. From the fundamental it rises with some difficulty, one might say, to the dominant, the A, and immediately returns to the D: it would seem that the soul carries a burden and finds it difficult to rise; the melody remains in the low register. Gradually, the melodic movement rises, turns around the F, and the A reappears at in conspectu to finally settle on the F with a beautiful unison development on the last syllable of Dei, which prolongs this image of the Virgin Mother before God presenting our prayer. In the last clause of this first phrase, that deep burden, that anguish that weighs on the soul, is manifested with a rapid, intense movement, a cry of supplication from the depths of the soul that is soothed in the cadence of the phrase recalling that confident peace of the initial clauses, F-E-C-D-D.

That peace is not to last, because from the beginning of the second phrase, that anguish resurfaces again. The melody becomes almost syllabic, a lively start that propels the melodic movement up to D, an accent of indignationem, and one feels a shiver, the fear of divine wrath. But it is only momentary, a fear that prepares the great supplication that springs from the depths of the soul and rises at a nobis towards the Mother of mercy: at the beginning it is somewhat timid, in the low register; it is the same turn as that of the initial intonation; from the distropha onwards there is a melodic echo with the turn of ut loquaris; and in the last clause of this broad melisma, the melody launches itself towards the melodic summit, the high E, as an ornament of the fundamental D, where the motif of the initial intonation appears clearly at a higher fifth and no longer hides the regret, the intense and insistent anguish that becomes more and more pleading. In the last notes of the cadenza, the melody descends, stops briefly at the A of the pes with the G-A episema and from there settles on the low D, as if after this great effort the soul places all its trust in the mercy of God, appeased by our Intercessor, our heavenly Mother.