This hymn descends from the Great O Antiphons, in use at Rome by the eighth century and chanted before and after the Magnificat at Vespers on each of the seven evenings before Christmas Eve, each one addressing Christ by an Old Testament title: Wisdom, Lord of Might, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King of the Nations, and Emmanuel. A versified Latin form, Veni, veni, Emmanuel, first appeared in print in 1710 in a Cologne hymnal with five stanzas; because two antiphons were missing, the translation committee of the Episcopal Hymnal 1940 supplied new stanzas in 1943 so all seven survive today. John Mason Neale gave English its familiar words, publishing a first version in 1851 and settling on the line “O come, O come, Emmanuel” by 1859. Neale also printed its haunting tune, crediting a “French Missal in the National Library, Lisbon”; the source eluded scholars for nearly a century until it turned up in fifteenth-century manuscripts from French convents of the Poor Clares, where the same melody had served as a funeral trope, “Bone Jesu, dulcis cunctis,” sung within the chant Libera me, domine, de morte aeterna. Sung before Communion on the very Sundays its antiphons were written for, it carries the Church’s oldest Advent longing straight to the altar where Emmanuel, God with us, comes in fact.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025