Lutheran Tunes for Lutheran Congregation Singing

We hold it to be one of the missionary duties of the Lutheran Church in America to acquaint the American public not only with the saving doctrine of our Church, but also with its sacred hymnology.

1918 The Northwestern Lutheran

The following article by F. W. H. is taken from the February 10th issue of The Northwestern Lutheran, Volume 5, Number 3, on pp. 23-24. A PDF scan of the original issue may be found in the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary Digital Library.

Our Lutheran Church is preeminently the Singing Church of Evangelical Christendom. No other church can rival her in the rich, soulful music in which she sings her immortal hymns. Countless other songs and melodies have been composed in their day, delighted their audience for a short while, and then passed into hopeless oblivion. Our majestic Lutheran chorals, however, have survived the wrecks of time, and are still today the delight of all true lovers of sacred music, irrespective of creed or language.

"The Lutheran Church," says Dr. Schaff, the noted Reformed theologian, "draws the fine arts into the service of religion, and has produced a body of hymns and chorals, which, in richness, power, and unction, surpass the hymnology of all other churches in the world." The late Alexander Guilmant, a Frenchman and devout Catholic, the unrivaled master of the organ in his day, declared that the Lutheran chorals are the most heart-stirring and inspiring tunes in the whole realm of sacred music. And the noted Episcopal choirmaster and organist of St. Louis, Mr. Charles Gallo-way, prizes the edification he receives, when serving at one of our church-concerts and hearing our congregations singing our Lutheran hymns, more highly than his stipulated fee.

Now what is it that gives to our Lutheran chorals or church tunes their imperishable charm? Knowing their history as we do, we must say that it is the spirit of heroic faith; singing in every note its profound adoration of the merciful and omnipotent God that makes these old Lutheran chorals so universally and solemnly impressive in their character. They are alive with pure and holy devotion. They thrill the very depth of the Christian heart because they are born from the deepest and holiest passion of their inspired singers. With few exceptions, they were composed in the heroic days of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, days that called for heroic courage to believe and confess the truth as it is in Jesus; days that demanded heroic submission to the inscrutable ways of our God and Redeemer. The same spirit of sublime, God-given heroism that inspired the texts of our immortal hymns also inspired their heart-stirring tunes. Hence the tunes are an integral part of our hymns. Deprive our hymns of their historic musical setting, sing them to a newer, modern tune, and you have deprived the rose of the fragrance she alone possesses, you have robbed the nightingale of her most rapturous note. You may then have a sorry hybrid of a poem and some sort of tune, but nevermore the original, forceful, edifying, compact hymn! For in our Lutheran hymns the text and the tune are welded as inseparably together as body and soul in man. The reason is that one and the same spirit of holy devotion gave birth to the texts as well as the chorals, or tunes, of our Lutheran hymnology.

Broadly speaking then, our Lutheran chorals are preeminently devotional in character.

It is different with the hymns and tunes of the eighteenth century. That was the time of decaying orthodoxy, and it witnessed the rise of Pietism in Germany and of Methodism in England. Speaking of English tunes in particular, it is a well-known fact that the Reformed Churches of Great Britain at first possessed no chorals of their own. Some of them (e. g., the Episcopal Church!) originally borrowed their sacred tunes and even many hymns from the Lutheran Church of Germany. Others (e. g., the Presbyterians!) contented themselves with chanting the Psalms of the Bible. They declared all "man-made" tunes and hymns to be inventions of the Devil. When, however, Methodism swept over the British Islands, it produced the two greatest hymn-writers of the English-speaking world, Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and Charles Wesley (1708-1788). They were followed by other hymn-writers, both in England and America, whose songs have been set to original tunes. But what is their character? Like the emotional spirit that fostered them, they are, with a few classical exceptions, shallow, insipid, and lacking in that deep reverence of feeling, that solemn harmony of tone which characterizes our old Lutheran chorals.

It is true, they call themselves Gospel-hymns, but upon closer inspection you will find that very many of them contain very little Gospel and much less of true choral music. Many of them are unevangelical in text, urging and exhorting the sinner to consecrate himself to God by his own powers. Others are so silly and meaningless that sincere Christians in these churches, among them President Woodrow Wilson, have publicly protested against their further use. In their musical setting, particularly, these sensational Gospel-hymns are but little removed from the degenerate and discordant "rag-time" tunes with which the Salvation Army tills the streets of our large cities at night. How much these decadent church-tunes of a more recent date have served to vitiate the popular taste for sacred needs no further comment.

But there is another class of popular church-tunes to which we wish to call attention here. We mean the sentimental art-songs of the nineteenth century that have succeeded in creeping into the hymnology of the Church at large, via the Christless opera. Writers of text-books on the standard operas of our day point with no little pride to the fact that so many airs of the operatic stage have become favorite tunes in the Church. We sincerely deplore this fact. Pleasing, captivating as these airs may be, we hold that they have no birthright in the Church of Christ. They were never intended by their composers for the sanctuary of God. Many of them are so sentimental, even sensuous in their character, that they ought to be forever banished from the chaste lips of the singing Bride of Christ. We hold with Dr. Frank Damrosch of New York who declared: "I do not want an operatic melody when I enter a church."

Now if all the above concerning church-music is true, as it is, we believe the slogan: "Lutheran Tunes for Lutheran Congregational Singing!" to be of insisting force for every loyal Lutheran. We were very much surprised, therefore, at a criticism that recently appeared on a newly published Lutheran Hymnary (hymn-book with tunes!) and which held the book to be impossible for the English Lutheran Church at large because, forsooth! one-third of the hymns were translations and half of the tunes German and Norwegian chorals. For the life of us we cannot see why the great number of original Lutheran hymns and chorals should prove a drawback to the general usage of the hymnal in question. We for one want to register our unqualified approval of our Norwegian brethren taking these chorals into their English hymnary. We for one would have held them disloyal to the best interests of our dear Lutheran Church if they had omitted to embody these matchless hymns and chorals in the hymn book intended for their children using the English tongue. We know that these old Lutheran hymns and tunes are not popular with the English-speaking people. But how can they be? Our English populace does not know them and therefore has them still to learn. And they can be learned by English people just as readily as they are learned by German or Norwegian folks. For the last ten years we are conducting a mission school in the tenement district of St. Louis, and we invite everybody and anybody to convince himself if our old Lutheran tunes cannot be learned by children of almost every nation under the sun! Again we can point to the negroes in our Colored Mission, who are originally neither German nor Norwegian, and who sing our Lutheran hymns with a vim as though they had learned them at their mother's breast. We know it takes time and patience to teach our rising English-speaking generation these noble hymns, but the joy at hearing our English youths finally singing the grand old hymns of the Reformation and glorifying their God and Redeemer in them richly repays you for all the trouble. When we hear of a Lutheran pastor who studiously avoids giving out our historic hymns and chorals in public worship, we cannot help thinking that he is either very vain and chasing after cheap popularity, or that he is very ignorant concerning the nature of true church-music, or that he is reprehensibly indolent and shirks the labor of teaching these grand tunes to his people. We hold it to be one of the missionary duties of the Lutheran Church in America to acquaint the American public not only with the saving doctrine of our Church, but also with its sacred hymnology. If we Lutherans fail to do this, if we prefer the light, emotional operatic tunes of the present day to the devout, edifying tunes of our fathers, and thus suffer our historic hymns with their chorals to be forgotten, we are depriving our own posterity of the sweetest choral music this side of heaven. Therefore: "Lutheran Tunes for Lutheran Congregational Singing!"

F. W. H.