The Surviving Fragments

What an Orthodox service-book today prints as a feast’s “Kontakion” is, in most cases, the surviving head of a once-vast poem by St. Romanos or his school — the prooimion, and sometimes the first oikos, sung after the sixth ode of the canon at Matins. This file catalogues the chief prooimia still in living use (“Today the Virgin,” the Pascha and Theophany and Presentation kontakia, and others), explains why a modern “Kontakion” is a fragment, and notes which of these openings are securely Romanos’s and which are of uncertain or merely traditional attribution — the full texts surviving only in manuscripts and critical editions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

A “Kontakion” in the Books Is a Fragment

The single most important thing to know about the kontakia in a modern service-book is that they are not whole. When the Menaion or the festal books print a “Kontakion” and an “Oikos” for a feast, what they print is the prooimion (the introductory stanza) and at most the first oikos of a poem that, in its original form, ran to eighteen or twenty-four stanzas (Metropolitan Cantor Institute, “Kontakia,” mci.archpitt.org). The rest of the poem — the body that carried the drama, the dialogue, the unfolding meditation — was shed when the kontakion lost its place in Matins to the canon and survived only as a token slotted between the sixth and seventh odes (see The Place in the Rite for how that happened). The familiar liturgical “Kontakion” is therefore a relic: the opening of a great hymn, sung as though it were the whole.

This is true even of Romanos’s most famous work. The Nativity kontakion known to every Orthodox Christian — “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One” — is the prooimion of a poem of twenty-four further stanzas, most of them a sustained dialogue between the Mother of God and the Magi, every stanza closing on the refrain “a little Child, God before the ages” (logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com, “The Nativity Kontakion of St Romanos the Melodist”; jbburnett.com/resources/romanos_nativity.pdf). In present use the prooimion is sung after the sixth ode, with the first oikos following as the appointed “Oikos”; the twenty-three remaining stanzas are not sung at all. The fragment is glorious; but it is a fragment.

The Chief Surviving Prooimia

A number of the feast “kontakia” still in living use preserve, as their opening fragment, hymns traditionally ascribed to Romanos. The principal ones include:

Nativity — “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable…” This is Romanos’s most celebrated kontakion and the one most securely his; it is the surviving head of his great Nativity poem (logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com; jbburnett.com). The first oikos (“Bethlehem has opened Eden…”) is also still sung.
Pascha — “Though Thou didst descend into the grave, O Immortal One, yet didst Thou destroy the power of hades…” The Paschal kontakion (Tone 8), sung through Bright Week, preserves the opening of a Resurrection kontakion in the tradition of Romanos and his school (Kontakion of Pascha, Tone Eight, as in the Pentecostarion; cf. mci.archpitt.org).
Theophany — “Today Thou hast appeared to the inhabited world…” (Ἐπεφάνης σήμερον), the surviving prooimion of the kontakion for the Baptism of the Lord, traditionally Romanos’s (the “On this day Thou hast appeared” model-melody; cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion).
The Meeting / Presentation of the Lord (Hypapante) — “Thou who didst sanctify the Virgin’s womb by Thy birth…”, the prooimion of the kontakion for the Presentation in the Temple (Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, 1995).
Other festal prooimia in the same case include those for the Annunciation, the Presentation of the Theotokos, the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Transfiguration, and Pentecost — many of which preserve, as their service-book opening, the head of a kontakion of Romanos or of the kontakarion tradition he founded (Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, 1995, which translates eighteen of the kontakia of the life of Christ; Maas–Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, Oxford, 1963–1970).

Of these, the Nativity kontakion is the one whose attribution to Romanos is firmest, both because it is his best-attested work and because the manuscript and editorial tradition treats it as the type-specimen of his art (logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com; Maas–Trypanis, 1963–1970).

Securely His, and Uncertainly His

Not every prooimion now sung as a “Kontakion” is securely Romanos’s, and honesty requires the distinction. The genre he perfected outlived him by centuries; the kontakaria (the kontakion-collections) preserve a great mass of poems, only some of which can be assigned to him with confidence, while many are anonymous or carry rival ascriptions (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris, 1977). The critical edition of Maas and Trypanis registers this directly by sorting the corpus into Cantica Genuina — the kontakia judged genuinely Romanos’s — and Cantica Dubia, the doubtful ones (Maas–Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina / Cantica Dubia, Oxford, 1963–1970). [Disputed: the precise extent of the authentic corpus — roughly sixty kontakia survive under Romanos’s name, but the line between genuina and dubia is drawn differently by different editors (Maas–Trypanis, 1963–1970; Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99/110/114/128/283, 1964–1981).]

Two cautions follow for anyone reading the service-books. First, a feast’s surviving “Kontakion” may preserve the head of a poem that is post-Romanos — written in his form, by a later hand, after the genre had become the common property of Byzantine hymnography; the fragment’s presence in the books is no guarantee of his authorship. Second, even where the original kontakion is Romanos’s, the surviving fragment is sometimes paired in the books with material of separate origin. The most consequential instance is the Akathist, the one kontakion preserved whole in the rite, whose authorship is among the most disputed in the field — the older tradition and some scholars assigning it to Romanos, much modern scholarship dating it earlier and excluding him (treated fully in Romanos and the Akathist). The Akathist excepted, the prudent statement is that the festal kontakia of the life of Christ — Nativity, Theophany, Pascha, the Presentation, and their companions — stand in Romanos’s tradition and several are securely his, while the boundary of the genuine corpus is a matter the critical editions, not the service-books, are competent to settle.

Where the Whole Poems Survive

The bodies of the kontakia did not perish; they passed out of the living rite into the manuscript tradition, and from there into the modern critical editions. The full texts — Romanos’s complete poems, prooimion and all twenty-odd oikoi — are preserved in the kontakaria of the great libraries and are read today chiefly in two monuments of scholarship: the Oxford critical edition of Maas and Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica (1963–1970), and the Sources Chrétiennes edition of José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes (SC 99, 110, 114, 128, 283; Paris, 1964–1981) (see also the English translations of Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, 1995, and the studies of Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Univ. of Missouri Press, 1970, and Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014). The student who wants the whole Nativity kontakion — the Virgin’s argument with the Magi, the long unfolding of the mystery — will not find it in any pew-book; it is in the editions and the manuscripts. The service-books keep the head; the critical editions keep the body. To know Romanos, one must read both — and remember, each time the choir sings “Today the Virgin,” that a single surviving stanza is standing in for a vanished poem of twenty-four (mci.archpitt.org, “Kontakia”; Maas–Trypanis, 1963–1970).

References

Maas, Paul, and C. A. Trypanis, eds. Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina / Cantica Dubia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–1970. (The critical edition; the genuine-versus-doubtful sorting of the corpus; the full texts.)
Grosdidier de Matons, José, ed. Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes. Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283. Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981. (Critical edition with French translation.)
Grosdidier de Matons, José. Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977. (The corpus and the problem of attribution.)
Lash, Ephrem (Archimandrite), trans. On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. (Eighteen kontakia of the life of Christ in English; the surviving prooimia and oikoi.)
Carpenter, Marjorie, trans. Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970. (English translation and study of the full corpus.)
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (The kontakia in their liturgical and formative setting.)
Metropolitan Cantor Institute. “Kontakia.” mci.archpitt.org/liturgy/Kontakia.html. (The surviving prooimion and first oikos after the sixth ode.)
“The Nativity Kontakion of St Romanos the Melodist.” Logismoi. logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com/2009/01/nativity-kontakion-of-st-romanos.html; and St. Romanos, Kontakion on the Nativity, jbburnett.com/resources/romanos_nativity.pdf. (“Today the Virgin”; the full twenty-four-stanza poem and its refrain.)
“Kontakion.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion. (The festal prooimia and their model-melodies.)