# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 07 05_S179
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

179

often sung by the Hussites in their battles against emperor and bishops.

Precisely in this old melody "Vater Unser im Himmelreich" you can see rightly how the people sang spiritual songs in those days. Granted, the choirs in the churches might sing slowly onward one syllable as long as the other; the people did not do that. Try it with that folk melody — if you sing one syllable as long as the other, it goes clap-clap, as when one strikes on a board, wherefore also in the rationalistic age, when people wanted to sing like the priests and choirs in the Roman church, that manner was declared barbarous and altogether unsingable; but if you sing as in reading, where each syllable stresses itself and sounds long or short, then it is one of the most wonderful melodies there are. The melodies arose in those days together with the words of the song, not through the calculation of a musician by the understanding, and therefore they were also sung according to the rhythm of the words. The demand of the people even the Catholic priests and monks could not resist; some among them translated the old Latin church songs, made new ones, often composed in the oddest mixed language of German and Latin words (e.g. In dulci jubilo, Nun singet und seid froh), or set spiritual songs to secular folk tunes. Shortly before the Reformation it was as if the priests themselves wanted to confirm the people thoroughly in the Roman error by this their favorite inclination to sing songs; there was no end of songs on the Virgin Mary, yes, on St. Anne, who is supposed to be Jesus' grandmother. About the year 1517, when the blessed Reformation began, the Christian German people was not merely prepared to seize with eagerness the pure doctrine of the Word of God, but also, as a spiritual priesthood, to receive its rightful share in divine service, real congregational singing at all divine services.

Dr. Martin Luther preached again in full purity and clarity the doctrine of righteousness by faith alone in Jesus Christ, and thereby reinstated the Christian congregation anew in its royal priesthood; what it had long desired, namely to sing along at all divine services, had now to be granted it as its right. He therefore wrote in the years 1523 – 1526 three writings on the German Mass and order of divine service, and determined therein that at all divine services the congregation should sing German hymns at the places where the choir had formerly rendered Latin ones, while he limited the choir songs and antiphons to their proper measure and cleansed them of all papistic additions. Now it was needful to provide spiritual songs. There were indeed already a fair number of them, but only the hymns of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren were pure of the papistic error; the others were for the most part mixed with it and therefore needed reworking, as those needed translation.

This Dr. Luther did with very many hymns: Nos. 17, 36, 134, 183 belong among these; others he composed himself, following, say, an existing verse, as No. 21, or after a Bible passage, as Isa. 6, No. 147, Luke 2, Nos. 41 and 65, and still others he composed freely, as Nos. 243; 42; 159. Printed on single sheets with the notes of the melody beside them, these songs, the most spiritual and lovely since the Psalms, flew out into all German lands and were soon sung in houses and workshops, in markets, streets and fields, so that the Romanists complained: the people are singing themselves into the new doctrine (the Evangelical). Although the fewest of the people could read, and therefore had to learn the songs by heart by being told them, as we now teach the little children all sorts of verses, yet especially the burghers in the cities soon knew these songs by heart and brought them also into the churches. When, for example, in the year 1527 Oldekop and Lampe in Brunswick began to preach the pure Gospel, the Romanizing council of the city had a famous Roman preacher, Dr. Sprengel, called Sprütze, come, that he might refute the Evangelicals. Now when he, on the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, had delivered a long sermon against the pure doctrine and had closed with the words: from this it is now proved that every man can be saved by his good works, a burgher named Nischau cried: Priest, you lie! and struck up No. 166: Ach Gott vom Himmel sieh darein. The whole congregation joined in the song, but Dr. Sprengel descended abashed from the pulpit and undertook no more preaching in Brunswick.— Already in 1524 Dr. Luther and his friend Walther collected these hymns into a hymnal which contained 8 hymns; in the following year a second edition had to be printed, enlarged with 8 other hymns, and in the year 1528 a larger hymnal of 56 hymns came out, since also many friends of Luther, such as Dr. Justus Jonas, Paul Speratus, Paul Eber and others, composed excellent hymns; that was a singing and ringing in German lands; the devil surely stopped his ears.

The notes of the melodies were printed with the hymns at once. Dr. Luther said: the notes first make the text alive. He was himself a capable musician, blew the flute and played the lute masterfully, and therefore also had real joy in providing the Christian people with melodies as with hymns. In the year 1524, when he was so busily occupied with the hymns, he invited his good friends, Konrad Rupf of Altenburg and Johann Walther of Torgau, to his house and kept them as his table companions with him so long until they had agreed together "über der Ton Art und Weis" and had set the necessary number of melodies to the church songs. This gathering Luther called the Cantorey im Haus. There the already existing spiritual melodies were now examined, and whatever of them had become perverted and tasteless through long use was done away; beautiful tunes to secular folk songs were adopted and set in church tone, and the melodies which Luther, Lazarus Spengler and others had invented for their hymns were brought into definite musical notation; for the poets in those days often composed the melody at once with the words, and Dr. Luther in particular had by then already invented the tune: Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g'mein, as he sang in the year 1530: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. What the "Cantorey im Haus" thus worked out, the melodies printed with the hymns, came among the people through the wandering singers, through the Currende scholars, who had to sing them in the streets, yes even through the town trumpeters, who blew them down from the tower in the cities two to three times daily, as is still the custom today in many old German cities. The melodies, however, were first collected in the year 1524 by Johann Walther in his "Wittenbergisch deutsch geistlich Gesangbüchlein, and in the book: Newe deutsche geistliche Gesänge, published in 1544 by Georg Rhaw, the same who at the disputation at Leipzig performed a twelve-part Mass, but later, having gone over to the Lutheran church, became a printer in Wittenberg. These were the first two Lutheran chorale books, works which laid the foundation for the quite new kind of spiritual song, arisen through the union of the spiritual mode with the rhythm of the folk song.

Rhythmically these melodies were all sung. Dr. Luther did not despise whatever was beautiful among the old Gregorian chants, which proceed in even time, but these he assigned to the choir, which he by no means abolished; he even still liked it that the choirs, which consisted of pupils, should render their songs in Latin. The congregation he did not expect to sing in even time, and probably hardly ever thought of it; the congregation sang its hymns rhythmically. Even the organ, which in those days was still rather hard to play and therefore little suited to quick playing, was not allowed to accompany the congregational singing, lest the free movement of it be disturbed; the choir had to lead and accompany with part-singing the melody which the congregation sang. The musical notation which we now have was then in process of development, particularly the designation of the measure of the tones, namely that they divide into whole, half, quarter, eighth, etc. The German Franco of Cologne about 1200, and after him Walter Odington of Evesham, had invented this way of noting at once with the notes how long or how short they are to be sung, but only the Reformation, and among the men of the Reformation especially Dr. Luther, brought these, like so many other inventions, into proper use of the church, and through the practice thus brought about to greater perfec-