HOTC #27: LSB 458, Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands

*The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb* by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1520-1522

The second Easter hymn in Lutheran Service Book is one that’s largely unfamiliar to non-Lutherans. The title, the first line, the key - everything about this hymn seems at first to be antithetical to our whole concept of Easter. There should be trumpets, bright major keys, and bouncy, fun, light-hearted tunes!

This hymn is nearly contemporary with the Holbein painting above, and shares many sentiments with it. In a way, we can contrast this hymn with “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” (LSB #457) from two weeks ago in the same way we can contrast the Holbein above with the Ricci painting that appears over on that post. The first pair (LSB #457 and the Ricci) celebrate the Resurrection loudly, as a quantity already known. The second pair (today’s subject and the Holbein, above), meditate, perhaps more poignantly, on the very concept of a resurrection, let alone the Resurrection. He had to die, and He did die - God made manifest in every way, human down to our most obvious frailty - our mortality. From the very first words of this hymn, Luther puts the novelty, the audacity, and the sheer stunning fact of a crucified man walking out of the tomb is center stage - Christ is well and truly dead at the beginning of the Easter story, as He is in the Holbein above, and that makes the wondrous event that much more exhilarating.

Along the way we discover Luther’s incredible ability to condense theology into verse, as well as a tune that has woven its way into the fabric of the musical heritage of the western world.

The Author

This is Luther’s Easter hymn. Yes, that Luther.

The Text

Both this and the hymn that immediately follows it in Lutheran Service Book take as their starting point the 11th Century Latin text Victimae paschali laudes. This text is generally attributed to Wipo of Burgundy (ca. 995-ca. 1050), chaplain to Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II and tutor to his successor Henry III. The text appears as LSB #460.

“Christ lag in Todesbanden” is Luther’s enlargement, and to some extent a meditation, on Wipo’s text, with the famous passage from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians as an evident basis:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

— I Corinthians 15:55-57

“Christ ist erstanden,” which we will consider next week, is a more literal translation of Wipo’s text.

Luther begins by stating the first basic fact that makes the Resurrection possible: Jesus was dead. Very dead. And we killed him. So, right from the outset Luther’s gone to pains to make sure we’re avoiding any Docetist or Gnostic heresies. Jesus had really died, to atone for our very real sins. Somber stuff. In the next breath however, the glory of the risen Savior is made obvious. He stands at God’s right hand, and thus joy must be our song. The verse ends by following it’s own instructions: all of the verses will conclude with an emphatic “Alleluia!”

What follows is the whole history of salvation in three verses:

The second verse is the Law, writ large and unavoidable. The scene before the Resurrection is bleak - mankind, as ever, in bondage to sin. The “Alleluia!” at the end seems to almost mock us here.

The Incarnation leads the next verse, with soaring poetry about the victory of Christ over sin ending with the clearest reference to I Corinthians 15:55-57, “O death, where is thy sting?”

The fourth verse takes us to Calvary, the Cross, and the momentous hours “When life and death contended.” Here, at the end of the historical narrative, the alleluias suddenly have meaning again. “Death,” to again quote St. Paul, “is swallowed up in victory.”

The final three verses turn from the narrative just related to celebration of the salvation thus achieved for us. The fifth verse meditates on the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God, ending a line eerily familiar from Luther’s most famous composition, “A Mighty Fortress.” This is followed by an exhortation, direct from Luther’s pen, to “…keep the festival / to which the Lord invites us;” a reference obviously on the one hand to Easter, but perhaps also a veiled reference to the Divine Service and the Lord’s Supper contained within. The final verse is devoted definitively to Easter, and the eucharistic imagery carries over from the previous verse with the image of Christ, the bread of Heaven. The Word now drives out the sinfulness dwelt on back in the second verse; Christ is our sustenance, gained at the Lord’s table as a foretaste of the feast to come.

Alleluia!

The Tune

As with CHRIST IST ERSTANDEN (again, next week’s subject), CHRIST LAG IN TODESBANDEN is clearly derived from the original plainchant that was associated with Wipo of Burgundy’s Victimae paschali laudes. Listen here:

The Gregorian melody has a noteworthy musical history all its own, appearing in works by many composers, from the Renaissance master Giovanni da Palestrina to the French romanticist Charles Tournemire and beyond.

The tune as refined for use with this text was initially published in Wittenberg in 1524, and may be either Luther’s work or that of his close associate and sometime housemate Johann Walther. The two collaborated closely at this time, particularly on the Deutsche Messe of 1526, and there is no clear distinction in much of their output at this time as to who was responsible for what. At a minimum, Walther likely edited this tune after Luther composed it.

Dorian mode

Like the Gregorian chat from which it derives, CHRIST LAG IN TODESBANDEN is cast in Dorian mode. Dorian is very closely related to the minor mode, lacking only a flatted sixth (in this case a B-flat) when compared to minor, and sounding identical otherwise. To our modern ears, this very minor-ish sound is what gives this tune the sad, somber tone that leads it to be omitted so often on Easter. I mean, it’s Easter, right?! Our ears want EASTER HYMN’s bright C Major, LASST UNS ERFREUEN’s solid, monolithic Eb Major, AUF, AUF, MEIN HERZ’s victorious D Major! Minor keys and minor modes are for Lent, right?! …riiiight?!!!?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.

Luther and Walther were working in a time before major and minor even existed (there were other modes identical to the modern major and minor scales, but the concept of major vs. minor didn’t yet exist), let alone had any sort of emotional connotations assigned to them. Victimae paschali laudes was set in Mode I, that is Dorian - the first of the church modes, and one said to be “…very brilliant, and in addition cheerful, gay, joyful, and majestic…” by Johann Andreas Herbst, a noted 17th Century musical theorist and composer.

So, that’s why the great Lutheran Easter hymn sounds so dreadfully sad to our modern ears: in short, our ears have changed, the music hasn’t.

Indeed, history since the composition of this tune has shown us that, in the hands of a competent composer, the jubilant nature of both text and tune can become apparent. This is nowhere more obvious than in Johann Sebastian Bach’s masterful early cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4, in which Bach sets all seven verses, infusing them with incredible joy in a work overflowing with symbolism.

The German Baroque period fairly overflows with works based upon this text and/or tune. Besides the Bach just mentioned, choral works include:

Johann Pachelbel’s sacred concerto (a sort of proto-cantata) Christ lag in Todesbanden, in seven movements much like the Bach.

Georg Phillipp Telemann’s Missa Brevis super “Christ lag in Todesbanden, TWV 9:3.

Christ lag in Todesbanden, SSWV 22, an earlier Baroque work by Samuel Scheidt.

A cantata by Johann Kuhnau, Bach’s immediate predecessor at Leipzig.

Organ settings of the tune are legion, as the tune lends itself extremely well to counterpoint.

Bach alone has four

BWV 625, from the Orgelbuchlein
BWV 695, is a fughetta in two parts around the chorale
BWV 718, the largest, in which the chorale melody is highly ornamented and is used to anchor the piece as it moves through various figurations

Two settings from Georg Böhm:

the first setting, upon which - to my ears, anyway - Bach’s BWV 718 seems to draw.
a large fugal fantasia, treating the tune more straightforwardly

A short, simple, contrpuntal setting by Johann Heinrich Buttstedt

A massive chorale fantasia from Franz Tunder, Buxtehude’s predecessor in Lubeck.

This, which is just oh so Johann Pachelbel.

That’s literally just a smattering of them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of settings of this tune.

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