Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation

Like the previous hymn, this magnificent composition is rooted in a Psalm (this time 103) and may be seen as supplementing items in the Psalm section of the book (103A, 103B). The German original by Joachim Neander was published in Bremen in 1680, the year of his early death. The history of the English text is complex; E J Palmer (b1869) wrote 5 stzs beginning ‘Praise thou the Lord, O my soul; let thy song upward soaring…’, but most paraphrases in current use are based on Catherine Winkworth’s 4-stz version introduced in The Chorale Book for England in 1863. The main changes to achieve a text without archaisms come in stz 2, where participles replace ‘reigneth/sustaineth’ etc; and 3 where ‘us’ replaces ‘thee’. The text is rich in Psalm references; as well as the beginning and end of the 103rd, there are reminders of 42:11; 91:2; 23:6; 94:4; and 150:6. The hymn also raises questions about modernisations of translations of paraphrases; in this case, is an editor’s first loyalty to the English, the German or the Hebrew? Winkworth’s 2.2, now widely adapted, was ‘shelters thee under his wings …’ But Neander’s reference was not to shelter but to raining, as the mother bird teaches its young to fly; Deuteronomy 32:11, reflected in G R Woodward’s version, ‘who, as on eagle-wing, beareth thy soul …’. That in turn, however, was ander’s own embellishment; Psalm 103 does not refer to wings at all! Nor, in the event, does the composite version adopted here. Stzs 1–3 are by CW; 4 and 5 are commonly selected from at least 4 more anonymous ones based on Neander’s German, and often worthy of Winkworth; EH prints 7 in all, 4 by ‘anon’.

The tune LOBE DEN HERREN, while aking its title from the opening phrase in German, is older than the words. Neander borrowed it from an anonymous melody in the 1665 Ander Theil des Erneuerten Gesangbuchs (or Stralsund Gesangbuch) which J Crüger adapted in 1668 for Praxis Pietatis Melica. It was further modified by Sterndale Bennett and Goldschmidt, the musical editors of Catherine Winkworth’s The Chorale Book for England. J S Bach has also used the tune in 2 cantatas and a prelude.

b Bremen, N Germany 1650, d Bremen 1680. His pastor-grandfather adapted the family name ‘Neumann’ to its Gk form. He attended the Paedagogium and Academic Gymnasium, Bremen; after his dissolute teenage years, Calvinist in name only, he was converted through the preaching of Theodore Under-Eyck, the new pietist pastor of St Martin’s Church in Bremen where he had gone intending to mock. He became tutor to 5 students at Heidelberg until 1673, when he visited Frankfurt and made the acquaintance of Philipp Spener and the Quietists. In 1674 he became Rector of the Latin School, Düsseldorf, run by the Reformed church. His pastoral work there became individualistic enough to earn him brief suspension before resuming a more traditional role. In 1679 he returned to Bremen as Under-Eyck’s assistant at St Martin’s, but pressure of work and opposition to his preaching may have hastened his death from TB in his 30th year. He was a student of nature who loved exploring the Düssel valleys, one of which was named after him and gained later notoriety from the ‘Neanderthal Man’. He may have written some hymns in a cave, but did not (as legend claims) live there. Shortly before his death he published several texts and tunes at Bremen, and his most influential prose item about singing; all or part of this was included in the hymnals of several church groups. Many fuller posthumous edns appeared and his work was included in the 1722 Reformed Gesangbuch at Marburg, from which more books have quarried. He wrote some 60 texts, the effect of which was partly to enrich Reformed praise with more personal qualities; see Julian’s very detailed notes. Nos.196, 775. Tunes published at 156, 297=356.

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.