György Orbán: Rorate caeli

In today’s lecture I shall try to show you how even a new work — one that in places may seem unusual — can be appreciated from the very first hearing, and how one can feel its emotional force. It is my firm conviction that György Orbán’s Rorate caeli is one of the outstanding works of the Hungarian and twentieth-century oratorio repertoire since Psalmus Hungaricus. I would go so far as to say that nothing composed in Hungary since the Psalmus is at once so complex, so dramatic, so gripping and so uplifting. The Rorate1 is an Advent dawn mass, held in expectation of the Saviour’s coming. It has its own text and contains not a single element of the usual Mass liturgy. The title itself — the phrase that gives the work its name — runs: ‘Heavens, send down your dew; clouds, send down your light; let the Truth be revealed.

Flowing round the earth, let the Saviour come…’.2 This, then, is a wonderful phrase of expectancy and hope. The text of the Rorate is a four-stanza hymn; each stanza opens with ‘Rorate’, while its second half sets out what we are waiting for. In these passages we take stock of our sins, of human frailty, and of all the evil that surrounds us on earth. As we name these things, our longing for the Saviour grows ever stronger. In the final, fourth stanza the catalogue of sins and frailties gives way to the hope of comfort and redemption: ‘Fear not; I am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour’.3 ¹ Rorate: the Golden Mass or Angelic Mass, which Roman Catholics celebrate every day from the first Sunday of Advent until Christmas Day at six in the morning.

The name ‘Angelic Mass’ comes from the fact that these Masses, celebrated in honour of the Virgin Mary, closed with the recitation of the Angelus. The Angelus Masses are a living tradition really only within the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; outside Hungary, this most beautiful form of Advent expectancy is observed in Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Poland. ² Isaiah 45:8. ³ In our analysis we quote the translation given by György Orbán in the score of the work. In Orbán’s workshop the text is expanded with three psalm excerpts. The first is the famous “Super flumina Babilonis” — “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept”, an excerpt from Psalm 137 in the modern numbering of the Bible. The second is drawn from Psalms 144, 94, 124 and 88: “Deliver me, O Lord, from the hand of the foreigners, whose very essence is vanity.”

The third is Psalm 51, again a text that has often been set to music: “cor mundum crea in nos” — “create in us a clean heart”. So a monumental work takes shape, ten movements in all. It is this many-sided work — with its extraordinarily deep emotions and its incredible dramatic contrasts — that I should like to present to you. The piece opens in a sombre mood: two semitones repeat, ostinato-like, in the bass. Later a sighing motif appears on the viola and grows into a simple melody — and this becomes the main theme of the work. The melody is a perfect embodiment of the ‘Rorate caeli’ text, in both its rhythm and its phrasing.