HOTC #11: LSB 396, Arise and Shine in Splendor

Winter is the season of darkness and light, when the shadows that dominate the evenings, nights, and mornings are driven away by candles, Christmas lights, decorations, and modern illumination. Epiphany, which closes out the winter season and leads us into the transition toward Spring, is awash with images and double meanings built around the image of light. In the same way that Advent hymns play with the double meaning of the “coming” of Christ using past, present, and future tense (as discussed extensively a few weeks ago), many Epiphany texts play with this imagery of light, alluding simultaneously both to Bethlehem’s star and to “the light of the world,” come that we might “not walk in darkness, but…have the light of life.”

*Der Stern von Bethlehem* by Carly von Spitzweg, 1870-1872

The Author

Martin Opitz, a portrait by Bartholomäus Strobel

Martin Opitz lived a highly-traveled life for his time, particularly considering that a great deal of it was lived during the tumult of the Thirty Years’ War in the first half of the 1600s, and that Opitz spent a good deal of time in locations on both sides of that monumental conflict. He was born in Silesia (in the western part of modern-day Poland) in 1597, and received a thorough education, which included French, Dutch, and Italian poetry. In 1618 he began to attend university at Frankfurt-on-Oder (today on the German-Polish border), before heading off to Heidelberg in western Germany the following year. Heidelberg was the seat of the Counts Palatine, and the present Count Palatine, Frederick V, had just kicked off the Thirty Years’ War in a serious way by getting himself elected King of Bohemia, much against the wishes of the new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II. Opitz then spent some time in The Netherlands before heading southeast to Transylvania in 1622, where he taught philosophy for a year in Weissenburg (modern Alba Iulia, in Romania). From there, he became a courtier back in Silesia, and (following composition of a particularly touching requiem poem for the Austrian Archduke Charles) was ennobled by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. He also briefly stayed in Wittenberg during 1625, and a house in that city commemorates those events to this day.

By 1630 he was headed to Paris, then finally in 1635 to the great eastern Hanseatic City of Danzig (modern Gdansk, in Poland), where he would die of the plague in 1639.

Opitz was one of the first poets to truly consider German to be a poetic language, something he had argued passionately as early as 1618, during his university studies in Frankfut-on-Oder. Indeed, he has been acclaimed by some as the “father of German poetry,” forebear of Schiller, Goethe, and the other great German poets of later centuries. Dafne, which he composed in 1627 and which was set to music by the prominent German composer Heinrich Schutz, is considered the earliest German-language opera.

The Text

Opitz’s text was published in Leipzig in 1628, in a collection of lectionary epistle readings for the church year, versified and set to French psalm tunes (you will recall from above that Opitz by this point had spent time in both central Germany [Wittenberg] and Paris, and so would’ve been familiar with both genres). He, interestingly, designates this hymn for “Three Kings’ Day,” or Epiphany, and takes as his basis Isaiah 60, as Isaiah 60:1-6 was at that time the designated second reading (where the Epistle would usually go) for Epiphany.

The opening phrases have a double-meaning: the hymn is actually addressed to the Church - to the people singing it - telling them to “Arise, shine” in the words of Isaiah, for “your light is drawing near,” clearly poetic (and translational) license for the second half of Isaiah 60:1, “…for your light has come.” It also carries imagery of the Star of Bethlehem, and of the Nativity: “Let night to day surrender,” much like the night was brightened for the shepherds as they tended their flocks in St. Luke, Chapter 2.

The themes of the text parallel the themes of Isaiah 60, where light is the overriding theme - one cannot “Lift up your eyes all around, and see;” (Isaiah 60:4) without light; likewise it is difficult to “…see and be radiant;” (Isaiah 60:5b) without light.

In human experience, however, light is not always good. The third verse gives us the traditional dichotomy of a dark and sinful, chaotic world of “…heathen nations dying / In hopeless gloom and night.” saved by the light of a God who has given us “Great glory, honor, and delight.” But in the third verse, Opitz’s text juxtaposes the earthly light “The world’s remotest races, / Upon whose weary faces / The sun looks from the sky” conjures images of desert nomads and steamy jungles where the heat and brightness are less welcome than, say, colder climes in January (I am looking out my music room windows currently at an ice storm-turned blizzard). This is immediately compared in the last half of the third verse, however, to the heavenly light, the light reflected by the church in her mission here on earth. Bearing in mind that the church is the entity that the hymn is speaking to paints the following lines “Shall run with zeal untiring, / With joy Your light desiring / That breaks upon them from on high.” It is Christ’s light, sure - the final phrase makes that clear - but it is the church that is commanded to “…make disciples of all nations…” with that light.

The next two verses (the fourth and fifth) expand this theme from the very start, as “…nations gather yonder / From sin to be set free.” This must’ve been a particular topical text in Opitz’s time, being as he was writing in the midst of the vaunted Age of Discovery, with new lands discovered and new peoples located constantly. The foresight and optimism to write such a thing as European Christianity seemed to be tearing itself apart in the cauldron of the Thirty Years’ War is remarkable, to say the least.

The fifth verse may be particularly topical for Epiphay 3 in Year A (coincidentally the Sunday on which this blog post is to be published), as it describes “…people without number” coming “…from near and far,” which seems to dovetail nicely with Year A’s gospel reading for Epiphany 3, St. Matthew 4:12-25. The broader imagery of light and darkness is also evoked in the Old Testament lesson appointed for that day, Isaiah 9:1-4.

I didn’t pick this one for this Sunday, but I’m beginning to think I should have.

The Tune

Opitz actually suggests a different tune for this hymn in its original source. GENEVA 6 (or PSALM 6 in some sources) is a French psalm tune (recall that this text first appeared in a set of versifications set to French psalm tunes) which appears in the Episcopalian Hymnal 1982 with a different text, which I have reproduced here:

Hymnal 1982, #308, which utilizes the original tune Opitz favored for his German text of this hymn

And given a recording of, here:

Not, I must say, the catchiest of hymntunes, but a close cousin of other French-language psalm tunes to come out of Geneva in that time period, including OLD HUNDREDTH (LSB #632, LSB #775, LSB #791, LSB #805, and LSB #923) and OLD 124TH (LSB #637, LSB #682). Just not as catchy, that’s all.

Side note: as you may have gathered from the numbering scheme, the numbers in the hymntunes of the French psalm tunes denote which psalm they were meant to accompany: OLD HUNDREDTH was originally intended for Psalm 100, OLD 124TH was intended for Psalm 124, and PSALM 6 was originally intended to accompany Psalm 6. More on that when we get to one of those tunes, some day.

The tune appearing in Lutheran Service Book originally set a secular text, “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen,” or “Innsbruck, I must leave you.” As one would guess from the geography of the city, the tune is likely native to western Austria and eastern Switzerland, in the vicinity of Innsbruck, and is Medieval in origin - our earliest printed source for it is from the composer Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517), in the employ of the Holy Roman emperors of the time, however its origins are assumed to go back farther than that in an oral tradition or lost source(s).

The tune made the leap to the exclusive contrafactum club (remember contrafacta?) very early in the 16th Century, where it is suggested to accompany a text given as “a little song about Saints Anna and Joachim.” It is best-known setting the sacred text from which it gets its name, “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen,” or “O World, I must leave you,” to which it was paired in 1598. The tune is used twice in Lutheran Service Book: here, and at LSB #880, in which it sets Paul Gerhardt’s (remember him?) evening hymn, "Now Rest beneath Night’s Shadow.”

The tune has been set several times by composers over the centuries, including its use in an Easter-season cantata, BWV 31, by J.S. Bach. Organ works by famous composers include two settings from Johannes Brahms’ Op. 122 (one of which I’ve recorded [#11], and the other of which [#3] I haven’t because, well, alto clefs are a bit beyond me at this point), as well as a setting by Sigfrid Karg-Elert and settings from Max Reger’s 52 Choralvorspiele, Op. 67 and his 30 Kleine Choralvorspiele, Op. 135a.