"How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" 1: O Bother

For the past three weeks, my plan to memorize 100 hymns in a year has been stuck. Number 9, "How Lovely Shines the Morning Star," has fewer stanzas than Number 8, "Prayer of Saint Patrick," but it's bothersome for several reasons.

1) It was composed, words and tune together, in German. Unlike "Patrick," it did not wait around for a versified translation before being paired with its tune. That means, for a purist like myself, that the full feeling of the hymn would come through better in German than in English. But it's more likely to be of use to congregations in English. So I mulled it over for a couple weeks--German or English? English.

2) But there are so many translations of it in English, even more, it seems, than of Luther's "Ein' Feste Burg" ("A Mighty Fortress"). I finally settled on a "translation, composite" from a Lutheran hymnal. Composite translations are so bothersome, because the unifying idea is the editor's rather than the translator's; you get even further removed from the purity of the original text. But, courage!--the Bible itself was brought to us by "translation, composite": the oral tradition passed through God-knows-how-many-people, then the various compilers and editors for the written form, then the translators for our English version, and possibly other steps I have overlooked in ignorance of the process. Singing "How Lovely Shines the Morning Star" from "translation, composite" is a great way of challenging my prejudices about the superiority of the individual artist.

3) The melodic rhythm of 1599 is slippery for 2005 ears to grasp, ears that have "cut their teeth" on sixteen bars of quarter notes. The Lutheran version, usually more rhythmically robust than the watered-down non-denominational hymnals, apparently preserves the original rhythms, guaranteed to wake up a stultified congregation. It lifts off with a phrase of mostly half notes, after which the second phrase echoes the melodic theme with a volley of rapid-fire quarter notes, then mixes up these rhythms in the third phrase. After two half-note rests in which to brace for the next round, the whole thing repeats. Then it glides into four beautiful half notes, poetically matched to words of one or two syllables, like cease-fires in the middle of the music, and bang! Off again into three measures of little black quarter notes, peppering the page, when you suddenly find yourself over a peaceful plain, wafting down on a beautiful descending phrase, the exact same rhythm as the opening line, that serves as a summation and cool-down stretches at the end of an invigorating workout. My mind is simply not used to this level of artistry in congregational song.

4) The text is uncomfortably personal. I found myself crying after the first stanza. The shimmering text, the beautiful melodic lines, the rapturous expansion of the idea of the "Bridegroom" now "filling all the heavenly places," like light itself, was overwhelming. What with crying after each stanza and then recovering and then reflecting on connections to my personal life prompted by this experience and then recovering from that and then thinking that maybe that's enough emotion for today, I'm having a lot of trouble getting through this song.