Canti sulla passione nelle Isole Maltesi

Abstract

There are found in the Maltese Islands different songs, or popular prayers inspired by the Passion of Jesus Christ. As this genre of popular poetry has been completely neglected so far by our scholars, what little there is available is incomplete, and sometimes fragmentary. They are recited verses and not sung by our general population, but nevertheless we can assume that in ancient times they were sung as, moreover, I was able to ascertain from an eighty year old man who, about forty years ago, used to recite a similar composition called Il-Vrajs in a primitive form of musical cadence. These songs about the Passion represent what traditionally has been handed down from century to century and from generation to generation - a concept of the elements assimilated by the sermons and the Gospels and expressed in a language of its own, in the form of verses without any fixed pattern of metric in which assonance sometimes takes the place of rhyme. From an analysis of the Maltese chants we see that the most important motifs are: the separation of Jesus from the Virgin, the sacrifice of the Son of God, the pain and agony of the Virgin, the premonition of the passion and death of the Son who accentuates the maternal pain, and the intercession of the Virgin with the Son on behalf of sinners. In short, the real protagonist of these chants on the Passion is the Madonna, and the attention of the reader or reciter is brought to polarize in a thousand ways on the dominant figure of the Mother wracked with pain.