All my heart this night rejoices

A 4th translation in succession brings us to the birth of Christ, and to Catherine Winkworth’s version of Paulus Gerhardt’s German from 1653, which she entitled ‘A song of joy at dawn’. The 15 stzs of Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen were headed ‘Christmas’ when they appeared first in Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica of 1656 (a date also given as 1653, 5th edn). PHRW prints 6 stzs; the customary choice of nos. 1, 7, 8 and 15 from the translator’s ‘free’ 1858 version of 10 of the 15 (in her 1858 Lyra Germanica) makes ‘a beautiful song for Christmas, which begins at Bethlehem and which, like many of Gerhardt’s hymns, ends in heaven. The full German version sets forth the meaning of the Incarnation and the whole work of Christ’—so says the 1988 Companion to Hymns and Psalms which goes on to quote Julian (p397; actually Lauxmann quoted by E E Koch): ‘A glorious series of Christmas thoughts, laid as a garland on the manger at Bethlehem’. The 1999 Companion to Rejoice and Sing provides a fuller quotation and useful summary.

The text here is the Jubilate version from HTC etc: stz 2 formerly began ‘Hark! a voice … flee from woe and danger … Brethren, come; from all doth grieve you’; 3, ‘Come, then, let us hasten yonder … kneel in awe and wonder’; 4, ‘Thee, O Lord, with heed I’ll cherish …’ David and Jill Wright point out that Gerhardt was well acquainted with danger and death; that 2.4 also echoes John the Baptist’s warning (Luke 3.7); and that the star of 3.6 is Jesus (Revelation 22:16). Both author and translator have mastered a rare metre. The tune BONN, or EBELING named after its composer Johann Georg Ebeling, was written for another Gerhardt hymn and published in Berlin in 1666, but since Sullivan’s 1874 Church Hymns it has been normally set to these words. Other tunes on offer are F C Maker’s NATIVITY, included in The Baptist Hymn Book, and David Peacock’s ALL MY HEART from HTC etc.

b Gräfenhainichen, SW of Wittenberg, Germany c1607, d Lübben am Spree, Saxe-Merseburg, 1676. Born to Lutheran parents in an agricultural town, he had many siblings but seems to have been orphaned while quite young. From the age of 15, being proficient in Lat, he attended school at Grimma and from 1628 to c1642 was a student at the Univ of Wittenberg. In 1637 a fire started by Swedish soldiers destroyed his home and all his family records, which has limited our knowledge of his first 30 years, overshadowed as they are with the ‘Thirty Years War’. But for nearly 10 years including some of his happiest, c1643–51, he lived in Berlin where he wrote Gelegenheitsgedichte, 18 items of which his friend J Crüger (qv) included in the Praxis pietatis melica. In 1651, aged 45, he was ordained as provost/pastor at Mittenwalde; he married in 1655 and 2 years later began his pastorate at St Nicholas’ Ch, Berlin. Here the divisions between his own Lutheran faith and the Reformed version became sharper. But in 1666 he was summoned to a consistory court and threatened with deposition; he resigned rather than sign a document supporting the liberal and syncretistic views of the Elector of Brandenburg. In 1668 he was called to Lübben as pastor and archdeacon, where from 1669 he spent his remaining years. The Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche in Lübben has a portrait and a stained glass window depicting him. While remaining firmly Lutheran, his hymns have a rare and deeply personal devotional sweetness not easy to convey in translation; in spite of all its distresses, home means joy, this earth is sweet, heaven is the natural focus and God is above all a Friend. Erik Routley says that with him ‘the truculent note fades; the personal and hopeful note is heard more strongly’, while Catherine Winkworth compares his ‘purest and sweetest expression’ with that of Geo Herbert in England.

His verses range widely in their themes, and while not among the most prolific German hymnwriters, writing some 132 texts, he ranks with the greatest, perhaps second only to Luther. But he was never truly recognised as such in his own day; he simply sang ‘as the bird that sings in the branches’ (Goethe). He adhered to traditional German metrical forms, and Crüger’s successor Johann Georg Ebeling (1637–76) further promoted Gerhardt’s hymns both by setting them to music and by publishing them. They proved surprisingly acceptable to German RC churches, but in translation they were not well-known in England until the mid-19th c, chiefly through Catherine Winkworth (qv) and the versions published by John Kelly (d1890) in 1867. Like the texts of other Germans, not to mention Britons, some of Gerhardt’s ‘flow on for too long, unto they have outgrown their strength’. But Lutherans have prized such hymns as ‘O Jesus Christ,/ thy manger is/ my paradise at which my soul reclineth…’ (1941 trans). Among studies of his life and work, Theodore B Hewitt’s detailed study Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and his Influence of English Hymnody (Yale and OUP, 1918) is still useful, and lists 31 translators of his work into English up to that time. 9 of these were women, 6 were Americans, and Jn Kelly (who studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh and Bonn) was the most prolific. 9 translations feature in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Since Gerhardt was probably born just 100 years before C Wesley, 2007 saw the 4th centenary of the former and the 3rd of the latter, which were duly celebrated together. Nos.349, 439, 844, 878*.

b Ely Place, Saffron Hill liberty, Holborn, London 1827, d Monnetier, Savoy, France 1878. Her early life was spent in the Manchester area, where with her eldest sister Susanna she was educated; in 1850 she moved with her silk-manufacturer father to the suburb of Alderley Edge, encouraged in her German studies by (the Rev) William and Mrs Gaskell, as later by the Prussian Minister in London, Baron Karl von Bunsen. She made the first and most decisive of 4 visits to Germany in 1845–46, mainly in Dresden. After a business recession she settled with her father and sisters at Clifton, Bristol, in 1862. Here she pioneered the higher education of women, as a governor of Red Maids’ Sch and founder of Clifton High Sch for Girls, member of the Clifton Assn for the Higher Education of Women and the council of Cheltenham Ladies’ Coll, envisaging eventually a university college for Bristol. Most significantly, she did for German hymns what J M Neale (qv) had done for Lat and Gk. She translated over 400 hymns by 170 authors, mainly from Bunsen’s collection of texts, combining faithfulness to the original with fluency in English. Her 2 series of Lyra Germanica: Hymns for the Sundays and Chief Festivals of the Christian Year (1855) ran to 35 edns, the title complementing Susanna’s 1854 translation of Theologia Germanica. These came without tunes; not being a musician, CW did not attempt to reproduce German metres in English. The Baron, however, urged the need of music; so with editorial help from the leading composer Sterndale Bennett and the fine musicologist Otto Goldschmidt, husband of the international soprano Jenny Lind, she produced in 1863 the influential Chorale Book for England. This also had a ‘church’s year’ arrangement, and was followed in 1869 by Christian Singers of Germany (‘a landmark in the Victorian reception of German culture’).

More than most, Winkworth understood the genius of the two languages and styles of worship, and also translated 2 German biographies. Though informed by varied theological influences she remained ‘a firm if sometimes unsatisfied member of the CofE’ (P Skrine 1991, who described her as ‘perhaps the best known and most effective mediator between the German and English-speaking worlds in the second half of the 19th cent’). She travelled to Switzerland in search of better health, but died at the age of 50 from a sudden heart attack near Geneva. She translated at least 27 of P Gerhardt’s hymns, 4 of them in two versions. Two American Evangelical Lutheran hymnals from the 1990s included respectively nearly 60 and nearly 80 of her texts and versions; 21 are included in the Moravian Book of Worship (USA, 1995), 19 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 17 in the 1965 Anglican Hymn Book, 15 in The BBC Hymn Book (1951), 8 in Hymns of Faith (1964) and 6 in the Scottish Church Hymnary 4th edn (2005). Susanna had begun to collect Catherine’s letters, but many had been destroyed and she died with the work unfinished. One surviving letter from CW to SW relates a dinner with some distinguished VIPs: ‘I had to talk politics in Italian and French, and felt I was making an awful hash of my languages!’. Another describes in detail at extraordinarily vivid dream about St Chrysostom; others from the 1870s express great anxiety about the threat of war. In 1908 Memorials of two Sisters was published by their niece Margaret J Shaen. See also the HS Occasional Paper, 2nd series no.2, Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (1992); and Robin A Leaver’s study of CW’s translations (1978). Julian, endorsed by T B Hewitt in 1918, rates her as ‘the foremost in rank and popularity’ among translators of German hymns, a position which has not been seriously challenged. Nos.161, 196, 349, 457, 556, 730, 761, 845.