WHEN I think about the sorts of music that have moved me to tears, two kinds stand out. One is the grand orchestral piece, played by a great many musicians, perhaps alongside a large choir. The other lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in the simplest hymn tune, with perhaps only four people singing. In that way, I remember being stopped in my tracks by J. S. Bach’s Christmas chorale “Uns ist ein Kindlein heut geborn” (“This day to us a child is born”).
I am not alone in my reverence for hymn tunes. The brilliant, maverick Canadian pianist Glenn Gould regarded the hymn tunes of the English composer Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) in that way, too. “Ever since my teenage years,” he wrote, “[Gibbons’ hymns (and anthems)] moved me more deeply than any other sound experience I can think of.” His favourite will probably be familiar to readers as the tune for “Forth in thy name, O Lord, I go” (usually called either Song 34, or Angels’ Song). Do not despise the humble hymn tune.
ALTHOUGH more than enough on their own terms, these tunes also have a life beyond the hymn book. There are anthems built on a hymn and its tune (“hymn anthems”), for instance. There is also an enormous repertoire for organ based on these tunes, usually called a chorale prelude (if it deals with the tune once), or a chorale partita, or chorale variations (if it works through the tune several times, in markedly different ways). One marvellous example is Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig”, as is Johann Pachelbel’s “Werde munter, mein Gemüte” — Pachelbel excelled in this musical form — which is also the hymn tune behind Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”.
Baroque cantatas and Passions were often punctuated by chorales, but these tunes also turn up in less expected places. Luther’s Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (“A mighty fortress is our God”) dominates Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony (known as the Reformation Symphony). Even when composers are not quoting hymn tunes, the majesty of the chorale, moving from one chord to another, the notes stacked on top of each other, has become something of a mainstay in symphonies, including Mahler’s Fifth, and Bruckner’s Fifth and Ninth (the latter, dedicated “to the beloved God”, remaining incomplete at the composer’s death).
Igor Stravinsky closed his Symphonies of Wind Instruments with another freely composed chorale, originally written and published in 1920, in memory of the composer Claude Debussy, who had died two years earlier.
Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) is among the most accessible and widely admired pieces written in the usually difficult “serial” style of the 20th century. It ends with variations on another Lutheran chorale melody: Es ist genug! Herr, wenn es Dir gefällt (“It is enough! Lord, if it pleases you”). The American composer Virgil Thomson’s first symphony — Symphony on a Hymn Tune — makes substantial use of not one but two such tunes (those of “Jesus loves me, this I know” and “How firm a foundation”).
The music of his compatriot Charles Ives abounds with real and imagined hymn tunes of that more revivalist variety. His four violin sonatas are good examples, while his Third Symphony, The Camp Meeting, draws on several more (Azmon, Erie, Cleansing Fountain, Happy Land, and Woodworth). Here, Ives often had a marching band in mind. Along these lines, the contemporary American songwriter Rufus Wainwright has a brass band wander on, playing “Immortal, invisible, God only wise”, during his song “Sally Ann”.
THIS story of hymn tunes, and how they have featured in musical history, illustrates one of the things that a theologian might want to say about created things: that, in its finitude and humble particularity, all that God has made possesses an unfathomable depth. Just think how many times composers have drawn out new beauties and subtleties from tunes such as the ones that we sing to the words “O sacred head, sore wounded” (Passion Chorale) or “All people that on earth do dwell” (Old Hundredth). It is because these hymn tunes are so circumscribed — not too full of detail — that they offer so much. It would take a Ph.D. or more to collect and survey what has been done with any of many tunes of a Lutheran lineage, for instance.
Hymn tunes play a powerful part at the porous boundary between the Church and wider social identity. Even in much secularised society, the songs that people know communally, the songs they sing together outside the church, are predominantly hymns: “Jerusalem”, “Abide with me”, the National Anthem, “Guide me, O thou great redeemer”, “Amazing grace”.
Whereas people used to know a substantial body of folk songs, such as the ones that my grandmothers used to sing to me when I was a child, that tradition is now largely gone, alas. Only the hymns remain, serving a folk function.
That relationship also runs in the other direction, however. Many of the best tunes in our hymn books have a folk origin, and were collected and harmonised (but not directly composed) by musicians such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, giving us Kingsfold for “I heard the voice of Jesus say”; Forest Green for “O little town of Bethlehem”; and Picardy for “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”).
Many tunes that we think of today only in relation to some hymn or other also, if we go back far enough, have folk roots, sometimes sacred, sometimes secular. Examples include the tunes for “Christ the Lord is risen again”, and “In dulci jubilo”.
WHILE I have mentioned things than can, and have been, done with these tunes, their glory does not lie simply in being something to be built or embroidered upon. They have a perfection of their own, just as they are.
Gould testified to that, and so does the story of the tragic, attenuated days of the composer Robert Schumann. As he was dying in an asylum, it seems that the last musical task that occupied his mind was to harmonise two simple chorale tunes. Only for the first did he write out the words, beginning “Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist”: “If the hour of my death is at hand, And I must travel on my way, Accompany me, Lord Jesus Christ.”
The final verse ends “I go then from here to Jesus Christ. I stretch out my arms, I fall asleep and rest well, No man can wake me, For Jesus Christ, God’s son, Will open heaven’s door And lead me to eternal life.” I hope that Schumann found in that hymn tune the sort of consolation that I have often found in this music.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
