Angel Gabriel: A Song History

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"The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came" is an English carol drawn from a Basque one, "Birjina gaztettobat zegoen," and hymnary.org lists its usual tune as GABRIEL'S MESSAGE.[1] The Basque carol was collected by Charles Bordes, and Mainly Norfolk, citing The New Oxford Book of Carols, says it opens his Douze Noëls populaires, part of the series Archives de la tradition basque, which it dates to 1895.[2] That booklet, issued in Paris by the Bureau des Archives de la Tradition Basque, gives carols in the Souletin dialect, with the Basque texts revised and put into French by J.-F. Larrieu.[3] The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology instead refers to a Bordes collection of Basque carols published in Paris in 1897, so the sources consulted here differ on the date.[4]

Painting of an angel in a red and gold cope greeting the Virgin Mary in a room with a red-curtained bed, with two small angels supporting her

Hans Memling, The Annunciation, oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 1480–89. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The scene the carol tells.

The English words are a free paraphrase by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), an Exeter-born clergyman and hymn writer.[1][4] The Canterbury entry suggests he may have met the carol on his travels, though his 1907 A Book of the Pyrenees does not mention it.[4] The same entry records its publication in 1922 in The University Carol Book, a series of pamphlets.[4] The arrangement most often printed in hymnals is credited to Edgar Pettman, whose dates appear as 1865–1943 in some books and 1866–1943 in others, and the Church Hymnary prints the setting with a 1922 copyright of B. Feldman & Co.[5][6]

The carol now appears in more than forty hymnals, among them The Hymnal 1982 and the fourth edition of the Church Hymnary, and hymnary.org links it to the Fourth Sunday of Advent in lectionary Year C.[1] It is a different song from an older English carol also titled "The Angel Gabriel," catalogued as Roud 815, whose earliest known source the Traditional Ballad Index gives as a broadside of 1639.[7]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came".
  2. Mainly Norfolk (folkinfo): "Gabriel's Message".
  3. Memoria Digital Vasca: "Douze Noëls populaires basques: en dialecte souletin".
  4. Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: "The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came".
  5. Hymnary.org: "GABRIEL'S MESSAGE".
  6. Hymnary.org: "285. The angel Gabriel from heaven came" (Church Hymnary, 4th ed.).
  7. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Angel Gabriel".