Macarie Protopsaltul

Macarie Protopsaltul, also known as Macarie Ieromonahul, was a Romanian Orthodox hieromonk, protopsaltes, and adapter of Byzantine church music who worked in the Principality of Wallachia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Traditional accounts place his birth around 1770 in the village of Perieți in Ialomița. Surviving sources say almost nothing about his family, childhood schooling, or the circumstances of his monastic tonsure. He became a monk, was ordained a hieromonk, and is documented as protopsaltes (chief cantor) of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Bucharest. That office put him at the head of liturgical singing for the Metropolis of Ungro-Wallachia and made him a natural agent of any reform of the chant books used in Wallachian churches.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Orthodox worship in Wallachia and Moldavia still belonged to the wider Byzantine musical commonwealth. The octoechos, the sticheraric and heirmologic styles, and the professional craft of the psaltes were shared with Constantinople, Mount Athos, and other Orthodox churches of the Ottoman world. Much of the sung repertory was still performed in Greek, even when the congregation spoke Romanian. The reform of Byzantine notation carried out in Constantinople around 1814 by Chrysanthos of Madytos and his colleagues—the so-called New Method—made chant easier to print and to teach. In the Romanian principalities that technical change coincided with a broader effort to replace Greek with Romanian in church and school, a movement that gathered strength after the upheavals of 1821 and during the metropolitanate of Grigorie IV of Wallachia, who favored Romanian in worship.

Macarie’s lasting work was to clothe received Byzantine melodies with Romanian liturgical texts and to issue them in the new notation. In 1823 he published in Vienna a Teoreticon, a short theoretical introduction to the modes and the reformed notation, and an Anastasimatarion containing the resurrectional hymns for Saturday evening and Sunday, the most frequently used part of the weekly cycle. Later in the 1820s he published an Irmologhion-Catavasier, the book of heirmoi and katavasiai required for the canons of the liturgical year. These were among the first major printed collections of psaltic music in Romanian. They did not abandon the Byzantine modal system or invent folk-like tunes; they adapted authentic ecclesiastical melodies so that clergy and singers could perform the services in the language of the people. Metropolitan patronage helped the books circulate in Wallachian churches and monasteries.

In his later years Macarie was associated with Căldărușani Monastery, a prominent monastic house north of Bucharest long known for copying and church arts. He died there in 1836. He has not been formally canonized, and no feast day or patronage is attached to his name; he belongs to musical and ecclesiastical history rather than to the calendar of saints. Historians of Romanian music group him with slightly later psaltes such as Anton Pann as a founder of a distinct Romanian school of Orthodox chant. Later printed books and oral tradition revised his versions, but the early nineteenth-century turn from Greek to Romanian in the sung liturgy of Wallachia is inseparable from the volumes he prepared and saw through the press in the 1820s.