Healey Willan: the Great O Antiphons

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The Healey Willan Society


The Canadian Music Centre

In June, 2011, Mary Willan Mason, the daughter of Healey Willan, assigned the responsibility of continuing the musical legacy of Healey Willan to the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius in Chicago, Illinois, USA, by legally entrusting his musical estate to the Canons with Fr. Scott Haynes, SJC, as Trustee of the Estate.
While Maestro Willan’s music is known and loved by church choirs, organists and instrumental ensembles, much of his music is no longer in print or has never been published. After Johann Sebastian Bach, Healey Willan is the most prolific composer of church music.
  1.    O Sapientia (completed 10 August 1957) 
  2.    O Adonai (10 August 1957)
  3.    O Radix Jesse (12 August 1957)
  4.    O Clavis David (13 August 1957)
  5.    O Oriens (13 August 1957)
  6.    O Rex Gentium (15 August 1957)
  7.    O Emmanuel (20 August 1957)
  8.    O Virgo Virginum (9 September 1957)
  9.    “O Gabriel” (9 September 1957)
  10.    St. Thomas (10 September 1957)
  11.    “O King of Peace” (10 September 1957)
  12.    “O Jerusalem” (10 September 1957)
The proper Masses for December 17–24 have also been incorporated into (Divine Worship) the Missal, which allowed for a wider use of the Great Antiphons as the Alleluia verses for December 17–23, with the antiphon O Virgo Virginum serving as the Alleluia verse for the morning Mass on December 24. Antiphon 19.2 (2015) 116–131 (p. 129). A Missal for the Ordinariates: The Work of the Anglicanae Traditiones Interdicasterial Commission by Steven J. Lopes.
An article at the Saint Gregory the Great Church website reminds us:
(M)ost of the Catholic Church already shares our patrimony’s gift regarding the O Antiphons in the metrical translation of these antiphons, the universally beloved: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” That translation is, in large part, the work of the famed Anglican priest, translator and hymnographer, John Mason Neale (1818-1866), to whose scholarly and literary gifts the Anglican Church owes its recovery of the great treasury of pre-Reformation Latin hymnody.
There is, however, another antiphon which is firmly part of our patrimony. It is our unique eighth O Antiphon, which we will hear on the morning of December 24th — a most fitting antiphon indeed to echo throughout the monasteries and churches of the land known then – and now again – as “Our Lady’s Dowry,” the antiphon O Virgo Virginum:
O Virgo virginum, quomodo fiet istud?
quia nec primam similem visa es, nec habere sequentem.
Filiae Jerusalem, quid me admiramini?
Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis.

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be?
for neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after.
Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me?
the thing which ye behold, is a divine mystery. 

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