Christmas in the Northwest: Clyde Thompson's There Is No Rose

Master Chorus Eastside recently began rehearsing a piece for our upcoming Christmas concerts, a lovely setting of a fifteenth-century carol, There Is No Rose, by Oregon composer Clyde Thompson.  I first became acquainted with the ancient carol many years ago when, as an undergrad, I was given an opportunity to choose and conduct a number for a school concert, one of my earliest conducting opportunities.  I found it in an old edition of the Oxford Book of Carols and fell in love with its simplicity and, to my ears, early music exoticism.

A couple of things make it memorable: it’s a macaronic carol, meaning it mixes two languages together, and the first verse acts as a repeated refrain, which, according to the Book of Carols, was sometimes done in liturgical processionals called sequences.  In fact, the Latin words in the first three verses appear in the Christmas Candlemas sequence that begins “Letabandus,” or “Come rejoicing.”  That may point to a church performance background for There is No Rose.  But for us the text is most famous as one of the movements of Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols.

The carol compares Mary, mother of Jesus, to a rose, a common symbolism in many Latin hymns and a few English carols as well.  Here is the poem, in modernized spelling, with the translations of the Latin words in parentheses.  I love the way the Latin and English phrases intertwine in shared meaning.

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;
Alleluia. (Praise the Lord)

For in this rose containéd was
Heaven and earth in little space;
Res miranda. (wonderful thing)

By that rose we may well see
There be one God in persons three,
Pares forma. (of the same form)

The angels sungen, the shepherds to:
Gloria in excelsis Deo: (Glory to God in the highest)
Gaudeamus. (Glory to God)

Leave we all this worldly mirth,
And follow we this joyful birth;
Transeamus. (Let us go)

In the early Church the rose, the queen of flowers, gradually came to symbolize Mary, the Rose of Heaven or the Mystical Rose.

A few early Christians were inspired by the contrast between this lush flower and its thorny stem.  The fifth-century poet Sedulius wrote:

“As the delightful and very gentle rose springs forth from a thorny bush without injuring the mother that it hides with delightful charm, so Mary, from the race of the guilty Eve, could as the second virgin wash away, with the coming sacred light, the fault of the first virgin.”

I found the above in a very interesting paper on the history of “rose” symbolism:

http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/rosarymarkings36.html

Eventually a real rose called the Mystic Rose was developed in Mary’s honor. 

There is no YouTube of Clyde’s shimmery setting, but it matches the beauty of the imagery.  The form, although compact, unfolds with skill and subtlety.  In what may be a touch of Trinitarian symbolism it falls into three parts.  The first three verses, which contemplate Mary and the mystery of the Incarnation, use closely related melodies, but the key center shifts with each verse, thus outlining each one in variegated harmonic light.  With the change of scene in verse four to the angelic “Gloria in excelsis Deo” a new melody appears and the key center moves to a bright D major.  And finally, as we are exhorted to leave worldly mirth and follow—“and follow” repeated twice for emphasis—heavenly joy, a third melody emerges and the music returns to the original key center, E flat, and stays there, no longer leaping from key to key, steady as a compass needle pointing to true north.

You’ll have to imagine what the above may sound like.  Or come to our concert and hear it for yourself.  It’s worth it!

Dr. Linda Gingrich

Artistic Director and conductor

Master Chorus Eastside