# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1853 05 10_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

123

le, when the rhythm is missing, be it now in song or in speech. Whole books have been written on rhythm for orators. And if it should ever happen to you, as it has to me already often, to hear a man of eloquent tongue speak in such wise that it sounds to you like music in your ears, then hold yourself assured that in his speech is that noble creature of God which one is wont to call by so foreign a name, rhythm. A master in the euphony of language was Luther, the master in many things, whose words echo again in the hearts of all hearers and whose translation of the Bible is an incomparable work, full of the old treasures of our German language and full of the most euphonious rhythm.

But what bearing has that upon the rhythmic chorales? A closer one, dear reader, than you perhaps suppose at the first moment. Song and speech have the most intimate kinship with one another, and as little as the latter can the former subsist or attain any perfection without rhythm. If you believe it not, then convince yourself. Rhythm consists in a beautiful alternation of long and short syllables or tones or notes. Try it once: read a hymn aloud, no matter which, and pronounce each syllable exactly as long as the other, like children in school when they spell or sound out letters, and then imagine a public speech delivered in this tone! It would then indeed be wholly devoid of rhythm, and as intolerable as this would doubtless be, so intolerable are the chorales which, quite as unrhythmically, are as it were sung while being spelled out, sounded out, and howled through.

Writer, with that you rebuke us too. We sing in our churches as was sung of old, and as we learned it in our youth. We find the old, accustomed manner quite edifying, and have a terrible horror of everything new and newfangled in divine service. — My dear friend, I should not for the world wish to make you angry, else you perhaps will not hear me to the end, and my pains are then not merely half but wholly lost. But whence, think you, comes it that one finds so very few people who are able to sing a spiritual song by themselves alone, though they have sung it along in church a hundred times? Why has singing disappeared from the houses altogether? It is not always lukewarmness in Christianity, worldliness and unbelief that are to blame, but this, that one knows no melody, or hardly one, rightly. And what again is the cause of that? Because in the melodies all articulation and rhythm are lacking. As little as you are able to grasp completely the sense of a speech that should be droned off in an unreasonable tone, so little can the sense for song that dwells in us survey, apprehend and retain a melody that is sung so unnaturally, without any rhythm and articulated structure. One does not understand it and cannot retain it; one confuses one with another, just like the uniformly spent days that one has passed on shipboard on the ocean. Rhythm alone gives life to the tone, and to a formless mass of tones a gracefully articulated body, which is at once beautifully formed and easy to survey, comprehensible and easily retained. And one may say with right: Destroy the rhythm and you have destroyed the melody! — Let no one object here that even among the so-called rhythmic chorales many are without rhythm and, like the melody "Es ist gewißlich an der Zeit," consist for the most part of equal notes; for they are all, without exception, truly rhythmic, only that the rhythm in some consists in the changing quantity of the notes, in others more in the changing accent. Of which one may easily convince oneself if one puts a trochaic text under an iambic melody, such as "Es ist gewißlich an der Zeit," for example the first lines of the hymn: "Ringe recht, wenn Gottes Gnade dich nun ziehet und bekehrt," where the number of syllables remains perfectly the same and yet the melody utterly rebels against it.

I know well how church singing in our time is for the most part constituted, and in what a dragging manner, devoid of all rhythm, the beautiful hymns of our pious forefathers are sung, how there is commonly no difference at all to be noticed between a jubilant song of praise and a confessional song full of penitential pain, since one sings or howls one hymn like the other, in the accustomed formless manner, with all syllables and notes equally long. I know also that many find this singing beautiful, and think that the sublimity of the content of spiritual hymns and the solemn mood of the congregation so require, or that it is impossible to find out another way in which the mass of the people could sing together. And indeed, if we had learned nothing of the rhythmic chorales, we should all still be of the same opinion. We should, blinded by the prejudice of an old habit, be unable to recognize the truth in this matter. The dragging congregational singing appears to be the old and proper, the rhythmic one new; and if it were really so, one would indeed have to regard with suspicion and distrust everything that is offered us under the name of rhythmic chorales. But now the case stands exactly the reverse: the dragging manner of singing, as it is the unnatural, is also the newfangled, which has arisen merely through sloth and deterioration, a product of those unhappy times when spiritual death settled over the lands of Germany.

The rhythmic manner, on the other hand, is the original, old and proper manner, as it alone is also the natural.

The proof I must not owe you, dear reader. Therefore I will gladly communicate to you what I have learned in this respect from the book of a man*) who understands the matter. The most ancient melodies of church singing, says this book, namely as the Christians of the first centuries, down to Gregory the Great, sang them, are lost to us. No tradition either has preserved them. They were sung in a time when one possessed as yet no means of fastening the tones, as it were, upon paper by written signs. They died away with the dying generations, just as our original melodies too were long forgotten, and with our slumbering forefathers would have remained sunk in the sleep of death, had we not found, among the rich inheritance of our fathers, a number of printed music books from Luther's times. When Luther came, one knew of no proper congregational singing such as we now have. The priest sang at the altar, the scholars in the choir, the Gregorian melodies, without measure and rhythm, a singing such as is still in use today in the Roman Church. Luther, with his childlike simplicity and lofty understanding, very soon perceived that in the house of the LORD not merely priest and Levite, but the whole multitude of the disciples of Jesus should cry Hosanna, that the whole congregation should sing to the LORD. But for a congregational singing that first had to be created anew, that old measureless Gregorian manner of choir singing, from which the name Choral is derived by misuse, was quite and wholly unsuited. New melodies had therefore either to be invented or, since this was not so easy, to be borrowed from elsewhere. Whence then did Luther take the necessary melodies? Here the fresh and song-loving spirit of his people stood him in good stead, a people so rich in beautiful melodies. For in spite of all prohibitions on the part of the priesthood, the German people had not let themselves be deprived of the habit of singing, on pilgrimages, at processions in the open air, indeed even on feast days in the churches, songs which had no proper place in the Roman liturgy, but were only, and indeed unwillingly, tolerated.

There were thus, to be sure, melodies at hand, sprung from the heart of the people, in the proper sense spiritual folk songs, rhythmic and full of sound, as is the nature of folk songs. These rhythmic melodies, which had partly arisen among the people themselves, partly been invented by skilful masters, Luther applied to the spiritual songs which he and other gifted and pious men composed for the Christian people, to be sung at the public divine services. Thus

*) Melodien des evangelischen Kirchengesangs im ersten Jahrhundert der Reformation, mit den dazu vorhandenen Harmonisirungen aus dieser Periode, herausgegeben von G. Freiherrn von Tucher, Leipzig 1848.