HOTC #4: LSB 334, O Lord, How Shall I Meet You

Here, for the first time, we encounter the team of Paul Gerhardt, the prolific 17th Century Lutheran hymn writer with no less than 18 hymns in Lutheran Service Book, and Johann Cruger, the talented cantor and composer with a full 15 tunes included in Lutheran Service Book (many of them setting Gerhardt’s texts). This talented duo would collaborate to create some of the greatest text-and-tune combinations in Western religion, including classics of the Lutheran tradition that would influence the budding composers of the next generation (Pachelbel and Buxtehude among them) and the following generation (Bach, most obviously).

The Author

A posthumous portrait (ca. 1700) of Gerhardt, from the church in the parish in which he died.

Next to Luther, it can safely be said that Paul Gerhardt is the giant of Lutheran hymnody in the first half of its existence.

Born in 1598 in a small village some 10 or 15 miles south of Wittenberg, Gerhardt attended the university in Wittenberg from 1628 to 1642. The great cataclysm that was the Thiry Years War was at full pitch at that particular time, and as Gerhardt could not be placed as a pastor owing to the exigencies of the war, he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a tutor and met Johann Cruger, his seeming alter ego and creative counterpart for the next several years. After a short stint as a preacher elsewhere, Gerhardt would return to Berlin as a deacon at the Nikolaikirche in 1657, a position he would remain in until the Calvinist Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick Wilhelm I, disallowed the Formula of Concord in an edict of 1664. He was briefly reinstated, owing to popular pressure which had led the Elector to make an exception to the edict specifically for Gerhardt, however Gerhardt rejected the offer on the grounds that he would not and could not repudiate the Formula of Concord, even tacitly. He went on to an archdeaconry in the small duchy of Saxe-Merseburg, in which capacity he was serving when he died in 1676. He is commemorated in the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod on October 26, along with fellow hymnwriters Philipp Nicolai and Johann Heerman.

It was Gerhardt’s poetry that had attracted Cruger, and it’s easy to see why. Hymnary.org reports over 100 German texts by Gerhardt, and while some of them have faded into obscurity in our time, the ones that made it into English are some of the gold standards of the Lutheran tradition. As one example; Bach (who was born just nine years after Gerhardt’s death), set Gerhardt’s texts something like 19 times. Hymns such as Auf, Auf, Mein Herz (LSB #467, “Awake, My Heart, with Gladness”), O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (LSB #449 & 450 [Gerhardt translated this hymn into German from Latin, from whence it comes down to us in English]), and others would revolutionize the way the world handled and heard the already staggering corpus of Lutheran song. One needs only listen to Bach’s setting of O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden in his masterwork The Passion According to St. Matthew BWV 244, or the equally stunning and superbly harmonized chorale Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier from the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248) to get a sense of the drama, emotion, and inspiration that a quality text like those Gerhardt produced could elicit from the greatest musical mind of all time.

The Text

The title page of Cruger’s 1653 *Praxis pietatis melica*

Wie soll ich dich Empfangen first appeared in the 1653 edition of Johann Cruger’s Praxis pietatis melica (Practice of Piety in Song), which included some 500 hymns (82 by Gerhardt alone).

The first and fourth verses are directed to Christ Himself, and are therefore setup as prayers: the first begins with a longing question, as the singer pleads for guidance, “O Lord, how shall I meet You, / How welcome You aright?” before transitioning to an observatory statement including more than a hint of allusion to the Palm Sunday events that traditionally mark the First Sunday in Advent (as we discussed in HOTC #1 a couple of weeks ago), and then a two-phrase petition “O kindle, Lord most holy, / Your lamp within my breast / To do in spirit lowly / All that may please You best.”

The second verse makes the Palm Sunday reference more overt, with Zion in this case having a double meaning: it’s obvious place in reference to Jerusalem in the Palm Sunday story, as well as a metaphorical reference to the Church as she awaits both Christmas and the Second Coming.

The third verse is blatantly penitential in nature (I often bring the organ down quite dramatically between the second and third verses, as a subtle way of tone painting the text). This somber self-reflection can be seen to follow the previous verse in the same way that Holy Thursday and Good Friday follow Palm Sunday in Holy Week.

Indeed, the entire hymn can be viewed as an allegory of the life and work of Christ: The first verse covering themes of expectancy and longing that we see in, for instance, the prophecies of Isaiah as well as Jesus’ repeated foretelling of the events of Holy Week; the second verse clearly dwelling on Palm Sunday; the third in a bleak, gloomy, introspective tone reminiscent of the later days of Holy Week; the fourth and fifth verses proclaiming what the love of Christ has done for us in His death and resurrection (a subtle nod to Easter?); and the final verse coming full-circle to End Times and Advent-ish Second Coming themes. The rich, colorful nature of the text gives the organist tremendous scope for changes of registration and color when illustrating this text.

The translation used in LSB is largely the work of Catherine Winkworth.

The Tune

The musical partner in the Gerhardt-Cruger team, Johann Cruger was born in 1598 in Guben, which today lies on the German border with Poland, southeast of Berlin. He studied theology at the Berlin Gymnasium and the University of Wittenberg, before becoming cantor of the Nikolaikirche in Berlin in 1622. He would hold this position until his death some 40 years later.

Cruger produced many of the most familiar Lutheran hymntunes. Their popularity could be ascribed partially to his position in Berlin and partially to his editorship of the Praxis pietatis melica, the most popular Lutheran hymnal of the time, but great tunes are created, not made (in the publicity sense), and Cruger clearly has some of the best. To his credit go not just the present subject, WIE SOLL ICH DICH EMPFANGEN, but also NUN DANKET ALLE GOTT (which he paired with Martin Rinckart’s text to give us LSB #895, “Now Thank We All Our God”, SCHMUCKE DICH (which he paired with Johann Franck’s text to give us LSB #636, “Soul, Adorn Yourself with Gladness”), and the towering JESU, MEINE FREUDE (also set to words by Johann Franck to give us LSB #743, “Jesus, Priceless Treasure"). Bach set an entire cantata, Ich will den Krezstab gerne tragen, BWV 56 to Cruger’s tune of the same name, besides his cantata Nun danket Alle Gott, BWV 192 to the tune mentioned above, and his stunning motet Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 227, also to a tune mentioned previously.

Needless to say, Johann Cruger knew what he was doing.

Typically Cruger, the tune makes great use of stepwise motion, preserving leaps for dramatic points (see the leap of a fourth to start the third [musical] phrase) or when necessary to set up the cadences (the end of the first musical phrase, for instance). Each phrase (as harmonized in the hymnal) has at its mid-point a half note with a suspension (the third phrase suspends the soprano voice), which can be “pulled on” by the organist (that is, by delaying the resolution of the suspension) to create greater tension and carry the momentum of the phrases forward. The natural rise and fall of the melody in each phrase (if one excuses the pickup note to the final phrase) further encourages momentum.

This tune is, sadly, somewhat rarely set, particularly for organ alone, with this particular organist (me) being unable to find any classical settings of the tune. There are several modern settings published by Concordia Publishing House, which are listed below.