For a Little Something Less Serious

[patrick457]

Here’s a clip from the 1968 film El Padre Coplillas starring the flamenco singer Juan Valderrama Blanca (aka Juanito Valderrama). The funny/curious thing about the scene is how Valderrama-as-priest sings the Preface in a flamenco style, in Latin no less!

A little fun for our adept posters: name stuff which the film gets wrong (from a rubrical POV). There are plenty, really.

 

[YoungTradCath]

Well, he’s super loud.

 

[MarkThompson]

A little tough to say about the rubrics, since by 1968 things were changing practically every month.

I did love his incredibly Iberian pronunciation of the Latin, though, with “qui” said “kee” and every single terminal ‘s’ dropped. If I had been forced to guess, I would have picked the accent for Catalan, but I see that Valderrama is from between Cordoba and Grenada, as I suppose is more appropriate for a flamenco singer. Either way, I adore Spaniards speaking Latin; there’s always a certain old-world resonance and nobility to it that’s lacking even in Italians.

 

[patrick457]

A little tough to say about the rubrics, since by 1968 things were changing practically every month.

I did love his incredibly Iberian pronunciation of the Latin, though, with “qui” said “kee” and every single terminal ‘s’ dropped. If I had been forced to guess, I would have picked the accent for Catalan, but I see that Valderrama is from between Cordoba and Grenada, as I suppose is more appropriate for a flamenco singer. Either way, I adore Spaniards speaking Latin; there’s always a certain old-world resonance and nobility to it that’s lacking even in Italians.

Guess which Preface he is singing.

 

[malphono]

I won’t comment on the purely Castillian pronunciation, or the volume, but it looks to me like there’s a versus populum table (what else?), and the altar boys appear to be standing. I have no idea what looks for all the world like a spit-ball fight by those people in the background is all about.

 

[malphono]

Guess which Preface he is singing.

The flamenco-esque trills put me at sea.

 

[MarkThompson]

Guess which Preface he is singing.

No need to guess – it is the prefatio communis, which is used when a special or seasonal preface is not assigned. Incidentally, it was also, for centuries, the preface required in all Masses of the dead, until a proper prefatio defunctorum was finally created and inserted in the 1920 revision of the missal.

 

[patrick457]

No need to guess – it is the prefatio communis, which is used when a special or seasonal preface is not assigned. Incidentally, it was also, for centuries, the preface required in all Masses of the dead, until a proper prefatio defunctorum was finally created and inserted in the 1920 revision of the missal.

For some reason, the whole thing with Our Lady’s statue at the beginning of the film makes me think that this supposed to be a Marian feastday, most likely an Assumption Mass, which of course has its own special preface in the 1962 Missal.

Did anyone notice that the choir was actually singing the Gloria, starting from quoniam tu solus Sanctus, when the statue was being raised at the beginning of the clip? Now one can notice a time skip in between 0:59 and 1:00 (the statue is now higher up the retablo, for one), but considering the space in between the Gloria and the Preface - especially if you include the sermon - they’ve gotta have to have raised that statue up VERY SLOWLY in the interval. That, or the priest has just sped through the Mass. (I was going to say: how dare they skip from the Gloria immediately to the Preface! )

And for the record, Valderrama seems to be wearing a ‘Gothic’ (kind of like the one you see most priests wear today) white-ish chasuble with a green orphrey.