Vespers

Before electric light, evening began with an act: the kindling of the first lamp. The ancient world surrounded that act with small pieties, and the church baptised it. The lucernarium, the lamp-lighting with thanksgiving, is the seed of Vespers, and its hymn survives in use to this day: Phos Hilaron, O gladsome light of the holy glory of the Father, sung at the lamps in the Byzantine vespers every evening, was already described by Basil in the fourth century as an old and beloved song whose author nobody remembered. The cathedral vespers built around the lamp kept fixed, congregational elements: Psalm 141, let my prayer rise before you as incense, sung while incense was actually offered, the evening's petitions, and thanksgiving for the day ending.

The medieval Western office added its crown, the Magnificat, Mary's song of the great reversal, the mighty cast down and the humble lifted, sung with ceremony, the altar censed during it on feasts, so that every evening the church ends its day proclaiming that God has remembered the lowly. Vespers has always been the office the laity could attend, set at an hour when work ends, and its history is studded with public splendour: the Sunday vespers of the medieval towns, the polyphonic vespers of the Renaissance and Monteverdi's 1610 monument, the Slavic all-night vigil joining vespers to matins whose music Rachmaninoff set. Where the office reaches the public at all, it usually reaches them here, at the hour of the lamps.

Every major Christian tradition kept its evening office, and each made it a signature. The Byzantine rite opens the liturgical day at vespers, following the Genesis reckoning in which evening precedes morning, so great feasts begin the night before with festal vespers and the vigil; the service's invariable Psalm 104, recounting creation, sets each new liturgical day at the world's beginning again. The Roman rite kept vespers as the solemn evening hour whose first and second celebrations frame every Sunday and solemnity, and the 1971 reform named it, with Lauds, a hinge of the office that even the busiest are urged to keep.

The most distinctive modern descendant is Anglican. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer fused vespers and compline into Evening Prayer, and the choral foundations of the English cathedrals turned it into Evensong: psalms in Anglican chant, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in settings that form one of the largest continuous bodies of church music in existence, all offered daily whether or not a congregation attends. Choral Evensong is now among the most attended regular services in England, drawing many who claim no faith, and broadcasts of it have run weekly on the BBC since 1926, one of the longest unbroken traditions in radio. The evening hour's durability across such different churches rests where Lauds' does, on the fit of prayer to moment: the day's end asks for thanksgiving, reckoning and entrusting, and Vespers has supplied the words for seventeen centuries.