Jesus, priceless treasure

This translation, itself now with many variants, has itself become a treasure among those who know it. It is as much a classic in its own genre as the previous hymn, though recognised as such across a much wider spectrum of Christian faith. ‘This profound and lovely hymn’ (W Milgate) is from the 17th-c German of Johann Franck, Jesu, meine Freude, published in J Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica (Frankfurt 1653), in C Peter’s Freiburg collection in 1655, and in the author’s 1674 Geistliches Sion. It originally had six 10-line stzs and an extra one based on ‘Our Father …’ But this in turn was modelled on Heinrich Alberti’s still very recent love-song Flora, meine Freude, from 1641. Some Lutherans and their cultural successors have felt the hymn too intensely and intimately emotional for congregational use. But in England, Catherine Winkworth included 5 translated stzs in The Chorale Book for England in 1863, with the missing one added in Christian Singers of Germany 6 years later. The first word is variously ‘Jesus’ or ‘Jesu’, and Songs of Praise and the Anglican Hymn Book both modified the language slightly (including 1.4–5 and 2.6). For the present book the Jubilate version is adopted, which includes changes in stz 1, from ‘… truest friend to me;/ Ah! how long I’ve panted,/ and my heart hath fainted,/ thirsting, Lord, for thee’. Stz 2 had ‘In thine arm I rest me;/ foes who would molest me … / sin and hell in conflict fell …’; and stz 3, ‘Hence, all fears and sadness!/ … Those who love the Father/ … Yea, whate’er I here must bear …’

The tune JESU MEINE FREUDE, marked ‘traditional melody’ but based on Alberti (see above), appeared in Crüger’s 1653 volume. J S Bach further adapted and harmonised the tune, composing further organ music around it.

b Guben, Brandenburg 1618, d Guben 1677. After his lawyer father died, the infant Johann was cared for and adopted by a relative. His schooling was partly in Guben, followed by study at the Univ of Königsberg. He returned to his home town after graduation to care for his mother, since Guben was vulnerable to violence by raiding soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War. In 1645 he began work as a lawyer and eventually became the town’s burgomaster. In 1671 he was elected as the Deputy for Guben to the Landtag of Lower Lusitania. Like his contemporary Paul Gerhardt (qv) he wrote much popular verse and some 110 hymns, mainly of personal devotion, expressing a longing for Christ and a relationship with him. These were collected into one vol and published in 1674. 2 centuries later, his main translator into English was Catherine Winkworth. No.730.

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.