The Ingressus Pilatus Chant in Medieval German Drama

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:One of the most vexatious problems facing editors of early European religious dramas is the question of how to reconstruct musical passages indicated only by brief incipits. The problem of expanding incipits is especially acute in the case of medieval German Passion plays and Easter plays, which are unusually rich in musical settings borrowed from the liturgy.1 In both Latin and vernacular plays, incipits were used as a shorthand device by scribes who could assume that their readers were already so familiar with Christian ritual that they would immediately recognize from a mere word or two exactly what liturgical passage was meant and how it was to be chanted. To compensate for the modern reader's lack of familiarity with the language and music of the Divine Office and the Mass, editors are now obliged first to identify and then to expand incipits in order to arrive at a reasonable approximation of medieval performance practices.