At 10:52 AM -0500 12/10/07, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
Hi all:
How many versions of chorale "Lobe den Herren" exist?
I've seen the Bach settings online, but when I do a search on Google
for a history
on the melody and look at the lyrics, there seem to be several versions?
One has to always keep in mind that hymns (and the chorales of the
Lutheran church are hymns) are the texts--the poetry. That poetry is
then set to the music of hymn tunes, sometimes composed for specific
texts but very often separate tunes with their own names and
histories which are coopted for a new set of words. I'm not sure
whether I can put my hands on my excellent collection of Bach's
chorales (Oxford University Press, now out of print) or whether it's
packed away someplace, but I'll look. ... (OK, I looked, and it
must be packed away.)
I first became aware of all this in grad school, when I went to look
something up in a huge, multivolume collection of hymns called, I
think, Hymnia Analectica (or something similar). I expected to find,
well, hymns like in church, with music. No!!! Volume after volume
of nothing but texts.
So can a hymn (text) be set to different tunes? Of course! The
example that comes quickly to mind is "Away in a Manger," which is
found in two quite different versions with two quite different tunes.
When a hymnbook has a series of numbers printed at the top of each
hymn, that's simply a syllable count for the lines of poetry, and a
text with 8, 8, 8, 7 syllables can be set to any tune that has the
correct number of notes to match the syllables. ("Away in a Manger"
is 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5.)
Then things are further complicated by the fact that a given hymn
might have 5, 10, 20 verses, and a given composer may have chosen the
verses for a particular cantata very carefully in order to match the
lesson of the day. Bach was a real master of this.
I know Christoph Graupner composed at least two cantatas with the
opening chorale using
Lobe den Herren as the text (although I'm not sure which chorale
melody he used).
Thanks for any help.
I don't know whether there's an article on "Hymn" or "Chorale" in New
Grove, but it might be a good place to start looking.
John
--
John R. Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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