The chorale was Martin Luther’s important contribution to church music. Featuring strong rhythmic tunes and vernacular texts, the early chorales were songs for all worshiping people to sing. Since the Reformation, a long line of hymn writers, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, has contributed to this genre, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of music in the Christian church.
Martin Luther
Although more than five hundred years have passed since the birth of Martin Luther in 1483, the influence of this reformer continues to affect congregational singing today. He was the greatest preacher in all of Germany, a thorough biblical scholar, and an influential theologian. He was also both an author and translator, musician and composer.
In writing thirty-seven song texts in German, Martin Luther intended to provide Christians with the truths of Scripture that he himself had worked so hard to recover. He believed that it was imperative for believers to know the Scriptures, to “hide God’s word in their hearts.” Largely because of his experience in singing in a choir as a boy, he was convinced that this should be accomplished through the singing of hymns.
It was the Bohemian Brethren who had earlier adopted the practice of congregational singing for worship and issued their songbook of 1501 with its eighty-nine hymns. However, it was the writings and publications of Luther which firmly established the practice. His strong desire to have musically literate teachers and preachers is evident in his comment:
I have always loved music; whoso have skill in this art, is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music or I should reject him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers unless they have been well exercised in music. (William Hazlett, ed., The Table-Talk of Martin Luther [Philadelphia: United Lutheran Publishing House, n.d.], 416)
In addition to this, Luther wrote the following in the foreword to the first edition of the 1524 Wittenberg Gesangbuch:
St. Paul orders the Colossians to sing Psalms and spiritual songs to the Lord in their hearts, in order that God’s word and Christ’s teaching may be thus spread abroad and practiced in every way. Accordingly, as a good beginning and to encourage those who can do better, I and several others have brought together certain spiritual songs with a view to spreading abroad and setting in motion the holy Gospel. (Luther’s Works, vol. 53: Liturgy and Hymns [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955], 316)
Because congregational singing in worship services had been banned by a decree of the Council of Laodicia in a.d. 367 and by the Council of Jerusalem in a.d. 1415, there was a need for hymns in the vernacular to be used in the services that Luther conducted. The songs sung in the vernacular at that time were sacred songs for processions and pilgrimages.
At first Luther struggled in an attempt to fit the newly written German texts to existing chant melodies, and his efforts ended in frustration. Thus he was forced to create his own texts and to restructure existing melodies to fit the new words. Using this method, he finished four songs in 1523. They appeared early in 1524 in the famous little leaflet, Achtliederbuch. Very soon thereafter, another nineteen texts were in print. Amazingly, in the next two decades, until his death in 1546, another one hundred new collections of German chorales were published. Five of these were completed under Luther’s own personal supervision.
He began to understand the language of the people more fully when he went among them asking how they would express certain phrases. This increased his own understanding of the type of syllabic singing which the people enjoyed. Previously, several notes of a chant melody were attached to a single syllable of the text. Luther’s chorale tunes however, were written with one note given to each syllable of the text. His famous battle hymn, Ein feste Burg (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”), based on Psalm 46, is a superb example of his style of writing and composing.
Luther’s new songs for worship services were taught to the children in the school. They in turn sang them in the sanctuary for the adults to learn. Thus, the children would lead the congregation in the singing of the hymns. The melody was always sung by all in unison without accompaniment, as the strength of the melodies and the vitality of the original rhythms required no harmony.
Other Chorale and Hymn Writers
Others followed Luther’s lead. Among the important contributors of this first period were Paul Speratus (1484–1551), Nicolaus Hermann (c. 1480–1561) and Nicolaus Decius (c. 1458–1546). The resources which they used for both texts and tunes were chants of the Mass, the office hymns, sacred German folk hymns, Latin spiritual songs, and popular melodies. Decius’ well-known “All Glory Be to God on High” is an example of a translation of a Latin liturgical text (the Gloria) into the vernacular. In other cases, new original texts were attached to pre-existing melodies. Yet other chorales were completely original works, textually and musically.
The next generation of chorale writers/composers continued to compose melodic/rhythmic tunes without harmony. Two outstanding chorales of this form by Philipp Nicolai (1536–1608) are “Wake, Awake for Night is Flying” and “O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright.” The first is often referred to as the “King of Chorales” and the second, the “Queen of Chorales.” These chorales were sung to tunes later used by J. S. Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn in a variety of works for organ and choir.
A pattern of alternation evolved in which the organist played or the choir sang a harmonized version of the chorale music in between the singing of the stanzas which were sung by the congregation. It was only later that harmony was played and sung simultaneously with the singing of the people. And with the addition of harmony, the music became isorhythmic, each note of the melody having the same time value as the other notes.
It was the work of Lucas Osiander (1534–1604) which brought together the congregational singing of the melody and the harmonized version of the choir. In 1586 he published an unusual hymnal in Nuremberg in which the melody of the chorales was put in the soprano part and simple chordal harmony was added underneath. The title of his book makes his purpose clear: Fifty Sacred Songs and Psalms arranged so, that an entire Christian congregation can sing along. This work inspired expressive works by Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612) such as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” and by Melchior Teschner (1584–1635), who composed “All Glory Laud and Honor.”
Other changes became evident during and after the Thirty Years War of 1618–1648. Paul Gerhardt (607-1676) became the leader of a movement to change the emphasis of chorale texts. The former, more objective viewpoint, gave way to a subjective emphasis, leading to the pietistic period of the latter part of the seventeenth century. With the aid of composers Johann Cruger (1598–1662) and Johann Georg Ebeling (1637–1676), Gerhardt’s texts grew in popularity. Two of his followers were Martin Rinkart (1586–1649), author of “Now Thank We All Our God,” and Georg Neumark (1621–1681), author of “If You Will Only Let God Guide You.”
Cruger provided tunes not only for Gerhardt but also for Rinkart and Johann Franck (1618–1677) in his famous hymnal Praxis Pietatis Melica (The Practice of Piety Through Music) which first appeared in 1644. By 1736 it had passed through forty-four editions. Christians everywhere still raise their voices together to sing his tune, Jesus Meine Freunde, for the text, “Jesus, Priceless Treasure.”
The Paul Gerhardt of the Calvinists was Joachim Neander (1650–1680), a close friend of Jakob Spener, founder of the pietistic movement, and of Spener’s associate, Johann Jakob Schutz (1640–1690). Although a Calvinist, Neander supported pietism. His hymns and those of the prolific writer Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) made increasing use of personal pronouns. The mood of the hymns became more subjective, and they were often used not only in church services but also in private devotions.
By the time of J. S. Bach (1685–1750) hymnals were much larger. The resources at hand were staggering. With great skill he reharmonized the simpler harmonic structures and provided singers with full and rich new harmonies.
During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries a large number of hymns were also written by Anabaptists, later known as Mennonites and Bohemian Brethren (the Moravians). The current hymnals of these groups have a generous supply of translations and music from their own rich heritage.
Scandinavian Hymns
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a large number of chorales by Scandinavians were published. Much of Denmark’s contribution to contemporary hymnology comes from three great hymnists. Denmark’s first great hymnist, Thomas Kingo (1634–1703), known as the “Poet of Eastertide” because of his many hymns on the theme of Christ’s resurrection, contributed the texts, “Print Thine Image, Pure and Holy” and “Praise to Thee and Adoration.” The second great hymn writer was the pietist Hans Adolf Brorson (1694–1764), known as the “Poet of Christmas.” Children everywhere enjoy singing his song, “Thy Little Ones, Dear Lord, Are We,” and adults in the Lutheran faith (as well as other communions) hold dear his inspiring hymn, “Behold a Host Arrayed in White,” along with its Norwegian folk tune. The third member of this celebrated trio of Danish hymn writers was the “Poet of Whitsuntide,” Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). For Christmas he wrote “The Happy Christmas Comes Once More” and “Bright and Glorious is the Sky.” Moreover, in his struggle to revive the life of the church, he wrote the well known hymn of the church, “Built on a Rock.”
Johan Olof Wallin (1770–1839), considered to be Sweden’s leading hymn writer, made numerous contributions to Swedish hymnals. And now some translations have found their way into American Lutheran hymnals. However, none of his hymns are as familiar as Caroline Vilhelmina Sandell-Borg’s (1832–1905) “Children of the Heavenly Father.” And certainly, no other Swedish song has been so popularized in the United States as Carl Boberg’s (1859–1940) “How Great Thou Art.”