Ut queant laxis
Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
Labii reatum,
Sancte Johannes.
The tune composed for the hymn in the Middle Ages, or adapted to it, had the peculiarity that each half verse began on one of the bars of the staff, and each a note higher than the last. This suggested, possibly to Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, the possibility of using these first syllables as a mnemonic device to fix the pitch of each note on the memory of those who were learning to sing. Guido, in a letter to his friend Michael, describes the device in terms which suggest that it was his own. But there is no warrant for the assumption often made in this connection that he devised the musical staff. That was in use in England as early as 1016, while Guido wrote about 1067.
A third of Charles’s protégés was Paulinus, whom he made patriarch of Aquileia (726-804), and who is specified by George Cassander as the author of three extant hymns. One of these, the Refulgit omnia luce mundus aurea, is thought by Mone to belong to the sixth or seventh century. It is in the ornate style of his namesake of Nola and his imitator Elpis, so that it may be the work of the older Paulinus. It possesses a philological interest as being written in the lingua rustica, or provincial and countrified Latin, out of which the Romance languages were developed. Paulinus of Aquileia was a German, who took an active part in the controversies of his times, as may be seen from his prose works. Walafrid Strabo in the next century speaks of him as a hymn-writer; but it is impossible to say how many, if any, of the hymns which stand in his name are his work.
The ninth century is much more fertile in hymns than either the seventh or the eighth. It is the age of Charles the Great as Emperor, of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar, and of John Scotus Erigena; and it witnessed the founding of the school of sequence-singers at St. Gall. To this century has been traced the beautiful paschal sequence Victimae paschali laudes immolent Christiani, one of the few which hold their place in the Roman Missal. Kehrein, on what seems to him good authority, ascribes the sequence to Wipo, the Burgundian chaplain of the Emperor Conrad II., and the tutor of Henry II., who has left us several poems on historical events of his time, besides a prose life of Conrad and two didactic poems for the edification of Henry. He was a man of unusual acquaintance with classical literature, which probably led to his selection as tutor to the young prince. All this makes Kehrein’s ascription of the sequence to him have an air of probability, which, however, is weakened, if not destroyed, by a comparison of this with his undoubted poems. These employ both the classic hexameter and the rhymed verse of his own age; but in neither does he show the fine ear for rhythm which the author of the Victimae paschali laudes must have possessed. The sequence was one of those Easter hymns in which Luther took such delight, and which he describes in general terms in his House-Postill: “In the time of popery many fine hymns were sung! He that broke up hell, and overcame the very Devil therein, therewith the Lord redeemed his Christendom.” Elsewhere in the same book he calls this “a very beautiful hymn,” especially finding delight in the second verse, Mors et Vita duello conflixere mirando: Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus. “Make it who will, he must have had a high and Christian understanding to have painted this picture with such fine gracefulness.” In his commentary on Hosea, he again quotes it with especial praise.