Hymn of Kassiani

The story

The Hymn of Kassiani, also called the Troparion of Kassiani, is the most famous work of Kassia, a Byzantine composer, hymnographer and poet, and the only known woman whose music appears in the Byzantine liturgy. She was born between 805 and 810 in Constantinople into a wealthy family. Three Byzantine chroniclers, Pseudo-Symeon the Logothete, George the Monk and Leo the Grammarian, tell that she took part in a "bride show" held by the Empress Dowager Euphrosyne for the young emperor Theophilos. Struck by her beauty, he remarked that through a woman had come the baser things, meaning Eve's sin; she answered that through a woman had come the better things, meaning the Incarnation through the Virgin Mary. He rejected her and chose Theodora. By 843 Kassia had founded a convent in the west of Constantinople, near the Constantinian Walls, and become its first abbess; a letter of Theodore the Studite shows that she had religious reasons for the monastic life. Her convent was close to the nearby monastery of Stoudios, which re-edited the Byzantine liturgical books in the 9th and 10th centuries and so helped to preserve her work.

Kassia defended the veneration of icons against the iconoclast emperor Theophilos and was scourged for it, but remained outspoken: "I hate silence when it is time to speak." The persecution ended after his death in 842, under Michael III and the regent Theodora. Kassia later travelled briefly to Italy and settled on the island of Kasos, where she died around 865. She wrote both her poems and the music for them; about fifty of her hymns survive, most of them stichera, though the authorship of at least 26 is uncertain, and as with Romanos the Melodist and Andrew of Crete the earliest manuscripts date from centuries after her life.

The hymn is chanted every year for Great and Holy Wednesday, as the doxastichon at the end of the aposticha of orthros and of the lamp-lighting psalms of the Presanctified Liturgy. A tradition tells how it was finished. In his later years Theophilos, still in love with her, rode to her monastery to see her once more; Kassia, now bound by her vow, hid in a closet and left the unfinished hymn on her table. The emperor found the papers, read them, wept, and added a line of his own, about Eve hiding in fear in Paradise at the sound of footsteps at dusk; after he had gone, Kassia read what he had written and finished the hymn. Many such stories, invented, grew up around the two of them.

The music is slow, sorrowful and plaintive and lasts some ten to twenty minutes, depending on tempo and style. It needs a wide vocal range and is counted among the most demanding works of solo Byzantine chant; choirs also sing it in unison, often over a Byzantine vocal bass drone. It has been recorded by Deborah Kayser and Nick Tsiavos (The Fallen Woman, 2008), in choral settings by members of Cappella Romana and the English Chamber Choir (2011), and by Cappella Romana under Alexander Lingas (2021). The Orthodox Church keeps Saint Kassiani's feast on 7 September, and in 2022 the Episcopal Church added her to its calendar on the same day.

What it says

A hymn for the Wednesday of Holy Week, sung slowly and mournfully. Among its images is Eve in Paradise, hearing footsteps at dusk and hiding in fear, the line the legend gives to the emperor.

The words