Hymn of the Day: All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name! ELW 634
Text: Edward Perronet, 1726-1792, sts. 1-4; J. Rippon, A Selection of Hymns, 1787, sts. 5-6
Tune: CORONATION Oliver Holden, 1765-1844
The first stanza of this hymn was printed anonymously in the Gospel Magazine (November (1779). Six months later the Gospel Magazine (April 1780) printed it again, this time with seven more stanzas by Edward Perronet and the title "On the Resurrection, the Lord is King." The hymn appeared once more in A Selection of Hymns (London, 1787) by John Rippen (1751-1836), There some stanzas were altered or completely changed. The title was "The spiritual Coronation," with a reference to Song of Solomon 3:11. Seven stanzas follow with titles: Angels, Martyrs, Converted Jews, Believing Gentiles, Sinners of Every Age, Sinners of Every Nation, Ourselves." With only minor modifications Evangelical Lutheran Worship uses as its first four stanzas the first four of Perronet from the Gospel Magazine and as its last two the last two from Rippon ("Sinners of Every Nation" and "Ourselves").
As with "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds" (ELW 620), the name of Jesus is associated with the imagery of the church as the bride of Christ from the Song of Solomon, but here the crowning on the wedding day is emphasized.
Edward Perronet came from a family of Huguenots who had fled from France to Switzerland and then moved to England, where Edward's father was an Anglican priest who sympathized with the Wesleys. In 1746 Edward and his brother became itinerant Methodist preachers. However, against the Wesleys' wishes, as one of these preachers he administered communion. In 1757 he published The Mitre, an intemperate satire on the Church of England, which further angered the Wesleys. He left them in 1771 to become one of the ministers of Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon. His attacks were not welcome there either, and he became a Congregational minister of a church near Canterbury. He wrote three volumes of religious poems.
John Rippon was born in England, joined the Baptist church at the age of sixteen, and the next year began to study for the Baptist ministry at the Baptist Academy in Bristol. In 1772, when he was twenty-two, he became the interim pastor at the Carter Lane Baptist Church in London. A year later he was made permanent and stayed for the next sixty-three years, until he died.
Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, German born musicians and composers who did much to enrich our musical lives, are commemorated as musicians in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church on 28 July. In recognition of this, today’s Opening and Closing Voluntaries and Offertory feature music by each of these great musicians.
Offertory: Ich heb me in augen Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672)
Schütz was a Lutheran composer and church musician, one of the finest composers of the seventeenth century and of the church generally. He linked the evangelical and the catholic, the Renaissance and the Baroque, and the Italian and the German.
Writing large and small pieces of tonal splendor as well as ones with a more archaic and delicate flavor, his music was sometimes a result of being forced to work with reduced forces because of the Thirty Years' War. He set German and Latin texts very well; his skill at setting German ones is unsurpassed. Like Bach, his vocation was a choral, not a congregational one, though in the Becker Psalter he tilted in a congregational direction.
Heinrich Schütz wrote this music as the setting for Psalm 121 in his Becker Psalter. Using the rhymed psalm paraphrases of the Leipzig theologian Cornelius Becker that were published in 1602, he began the Becker Psalter in the early 1620s as the psalms at the morning and evening prayers of his choirboys at Dresden, for whom he also wrote table graces. After the death of his wife he completed these psalms and published them in 1628. They had been sung to hymn tunes. Schütz took over thirteen of those tunes and added ninety new ones. As usual, he conceived them with choral textual declamation. Hymnbooks understandably have not generally included these settings.
Opening Voluntary: Sonata #7 in F Major: Siciliana and Gigue Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1789)
George Frideric Handel was a composer of baroque music who was born in Germany but became an English citizen. His most famous works include his Messiah, Water Music, baroque Italian operas, and English oratorios. A hugely successful composer in his own lifetime, his last years were blighted by blindness. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Handel's Sonata #7 in F major for Recorder and Basso continuo, is thought to have been composed around 1725. This sonata is a favorite among flute and recorder players. Of the 15 or so sonatas for solo instrument and basso continuo composed by Handel that have at various times been lumped together under the title Opus 1, a full third were originally composed for the recorder. In fact, only the violin is more fully represented in the collection. They are all splendid examples of Handel's youthful craftsmanship. In many of these sonatas Handel either quotes or anticipates himself, and so it is no surprise that Handel adapted this Sonata in FM into an organ concerto for himself to play which probably indicates his own fondness of the work.
The Gigue is a joyous and infectious reworking of one of Handel's favorite instrumental themes. This kind of piece, also known under the Italian spelling Giga, is to be thought as the music to the lively baroque dance of the same name, which originates from the British jig.
Closing Voluntary: “Chorale Prelude: “Vater unser im Himmelreich (Our Father, who art in Heaven)” BWV 737, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach enriched established German styles through his mastery of counterpoint, harmonic, and motivic organization, and his adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures that he learned from his experiences abroad, particularly in Italy and France. Throughout the18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities. The 19th century saw the publication of some significant Bach biographies, and by the end of that century, all of his known music had been printed. Dissemination of scholarship on the composer continued through periodicals (and later also websites) exclusively devoted to him and other publications such as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV, a numbered catalogue of his works) and new critical editions of his compositions.
The organ works of Bach can be broadly divided into two groups. First, there is a large assortment of pieces of all kinds which includes the famous Toccatas, Preludes and Fugues, the six Trio Sonatas, and numerous other pieces in various styles and forms. Second, there is the large corpus of Chorale Preludes. Many of these are miscellaneous compositions while others belong to collections which follow a plan with regard to their content and some of which were published in the composer’s lifetime. The latter is very significant because in the early 18th century a great deal of music still circulated only in manuscript form, either autograph manuscripts (in the composer’s own hand) or copies (frequently made by pupils). This setting of “Vater unser” employs a somewhat antique style in which imitative treatment of each phrase of the melody acts as a precursor to its presentation in the highest voice.