ABSTRACT
More than forty years ago Dom Hesbert catalogued the chief remnants from the
Old Beneventan liturgy: to wit, melodies for the propers of eighteen masses preserved as alternatives to Gregorian melodies in the two oldest Beneventan
graduals dating from the first half of the eleventh century and parts of two other
masses surviving from a still older pure Beneventan book.1 Dom Hesbert thought
that Gregorian chant must have begun to displace these Old Beneventan melodies before 808-w hen, according to some, the supposed relics of St. Bartholomew were
brought to the city.2 The mass for the translation of the relics of the flayed apostle is
in fact composed in neo-Gregorian rather than Old Beneventan style. This
interesting but shaky bit of evidence is not however in itself proof enough firmly to
date the introduction of Gregorian chant at Benevento. For all we really know,
Gregorian chant might have come to Benevento even as late as the reign of the first
Otto though hardly later than 960. For Gregorian melodies had already displaced most Old Beneventan music in our earliest manuscripts, from the late tenth and
early eleventh centuries; and in later manuscripts even these remaining Old
Beneventan vestiges have been suppressed.
