This Sunday, our processional hymn is “Savior of the nations, come.” For some reason, this venerable hymn didn’t get included in the 1940 Hymnal we sing from (although it is in the 1982 Hymnal of the Episcopal Church and in the recent Book of Common Praise, the hymnal used by our brothers and sisters in the Reformed Episcopal Church). We’ll sing it from an insert in the bulletin with a harmonization taken from the final chorale of one of J. S. Bach’s cantatas for Advent.
Our sequence hymn will again be “Creator of the stars of night.” Some remarkable arrangements of this melody are featured on the recording of Advent music I reviewed this week.
The text for our sermon hymn, “O very God of very God,” was written by John Mason Neale (1818-1866), the author of 4 other hymns in our Hymnal, and the translator (mostly from ancient Greek and Latin sources) of no fewer than 34 hymns, including our current sequence hymn and “Of the Father’s love begotten,” which we”ll be singing during Christmastide.
The tune to this hymn is BANGOR, and it first appears in print in a 1734 hymnal published in England. It first appears in the United States around 1767 in a Boston hymnal. If you’re wondering about possible connections between the name of this tune and the name of the city in Maine, The Hymnal 1940 Companion (1949) reports the following:
A New England folk tale has it that in 1781, when the citizens of what has since become an important city of Maine petitioned for incorporation, they sent their minister, the Reverend Seth Noble, to Boston on their errand. As the clerk was filling out the papers, the minister stood by, quietly humming to himself. When the clerk suddenly asked him, “What’s the name?”, he absentmindedly gave the name of the tune, Bangor.
Our two Communion hymns are “O God, unseen yet ever near” (Hymnal #198) and “Let all mortal flesh keep silence” (Hymnal, #197) The text is the Cherubic Hymn from the Liturgy of St. James of Jerusalem as used in Orthodox churches, and it may have been sung since the 5th century. The tune is based on a French folk melody first written down in 1860 and first used in a hymnal in the 1906 first edition of The English Hymnal, which — under the leadership of Ralph Vaughan Williams, incorporated an unprecedented number of folk melodies as hymn tunes. (The story of The English Hymnal is told here.)
Our closing hymn is the stirring “Wake, awake, for night is flying.” The hymn text and tune are the work of Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608), a Lutheran pastor whose parish in Westphalia witnessed the death of over 1,300 members during an epidemic which raged between July 1597 and January 1598. The following year he published the text and tune to this hymn as an appendix to his Freudenspiegel des ewigen Lebes (Joyful Reflection of Eternal Life). In that book’s preface, Nicolai wrote:
Day by day I wrote out my meditations, found myself, thank God, wonderfully well, comforted in heart, joyful in spirit, and truly content; I gave to my manuscript the name and title Mirror of Joys, to leave behind me (if God should call me from this world) as the token of my peaceful, joyful, Christian departure, or (if God should spare me in health) to comfort other sufferers whom he should also visit with the pestilence. . . .
Given our current reflection on the Four Last Things in our Advent sermons (death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell), Nicolai’s personal experience as well as his confident hymn are a source of fruitful meditation. Nicolai’s tune (best-known as WACHET AUF, although in our Hymnal it’s presented as SLEEPERS, WAKE) has been set by many composers; on the recording I reviewed this week, there is an arrangement for solo voice and strings, a recording of which is embedded in the review.
The choir’s music this week echoes the congregational hymns. Our Offertory anthem is a setting of the same melody that our processional hymn used, Luther’s Nun komm der Heiden Heiland. The German text we will sing is the first verse of the original hymn, which is essentially the same as the English of the hymn. The composer for our 6-part anthem is Michael Praetorius (1571-1621). His work is represented in our Hymnal in his harmonization of the melody in “I know a rose-tree springing” (#17).
During Communion the choir will sing a setting of Conditor alme siderum, the tune of our sequence hymn, by Tómas Luis de Victoria. As was common during Renaissance compositions, Victoria alternates between plainchant on the odd-numbered stanzas and more intricate polyphony on the even numbered verses. For more about the life and work of Victoria, read “Christus Victoriae.”
See you Sunday!