Chorales in Early Lutheranism There

¶ … Chorales in Early Lutheranism There are several influences that helped bring the chorales to Lutheranism, and this paper will review and analyze those influences. One motivating source that was an important part of the launch of early Lutheran Church chorales was, ironically, the Roman Catholic Church. According to Richard Schoenbohm of Valparaiso University Martin Luther is generally given credit for introducing the singing of hymns -- chorale music -- in Lutheran church services, and to some extent that is true.

Indeed, this was Luther's strategy for dramatically diverting his Lutheran followers from the Catholic Church's dogma of Gregorian chants, what Schoenbohm calls "ritualistic and even pantomimical" practices. The Catholic services used music as a "clerical," "official, prescribed, liturgic" and "unalterable" source of worship (Schoenbohm, 1943, p. 195). On the other hand, the chorale hymns used in the early Lutheran Church services was "free, spontaneous, and democratic," Schoenbohm explains.

And Protestant scholars through the years have in general "bestowed unstinted praise upon Luther" as the leader who afforded early Lutheran churchgoers the chance to express their spiritual emotions through song (Schoenbohm, p. 196). However, Schoenbohm goes on, most of those Protestant scholars either ignore or are ignorant of the fact that there were "popular religious" songs sung in church services "before the Reformation" (p. 196). The author of this article asserts (p.

196) that Lutheran hymnody "did not begin with Luther" but rather the fact is German hymns were song "from the earliest times to the beginning of the seventeenth century" (p. 196).

While those hymns had been sung well before Luther, Schoenbohm explains that Luther "…charged the popular hymnody of the day with the energy of his world-transforming doctrine," and Luther gave it a "dignity" that it had previously not had "since the apostolic age." There are those who claimed that Luther's promotion of Reformation doctrines was "due more to Luther's hymns than to his sermons" (p. 196).

Schoenbohm writes that a "very prolific" source of the German Chorale were "the secular folksongs of the 16th Century." When one carefully reads through Schoenbohm's article and checks the footnotes, many of the footnotes refer to Edward Dickinson's 1902 publication, Music in the History of the Western Church. In fact, Schoenbohm does not quote the Dickinson text or allude to it in his narrative -- he simply borrows, plagiarizes whole paragraphs from Dickinson as if they were his own.

He does use "ibid" over and over so the reader knows the information somehow comes from Dickinson's work, but there are no quotes, there is no attribution in the narrative of Schoenbohm. Perhaps this was acceptable scholarship 60+ years ago but it would never stand up to academic scrutiny today. Meanwhile Dickinson's 1902 book provides what seems to be solid historical research into the music that led up to -- and influenced -- the chorales used by the early Lutherans.

On page 225 Dickinson asserts that the melodies to which Luther's hymns were based "…became the foundation of a musical style which is the one school worthy to be placed beside the Italian Catholic music of the sixteenth century." Moreover, the hymnody was the "first adequate outlet for the poetic and musical genius of the German people" and these early Lutheran hymns were the drivers of the "spiritual and intellectual force" that emerged in Europe at that time.

But what were the musical and poetic forerunners to the early Lutheran hymns? On page 225 Dickenson claims that "Clement of Alexandria and Ephraem the Syrian set in motion the tide of Christian song." And so students of Lutheran history should know that well prior to the hymns that Luther made popular there were Christians like Ephraem the Syrian who were writing poetry and setting it to music, hence, Christian hymns, rudimentary though it was compared with today's hymns. The book titled Ephraem the Syrian: Hymns (edited by Kathleen E.

McVey) explains that Ephraem's "Hymns Against Julian" were written in the year 363, and they were composed during the final weeks of Emperor Julian's reign (and some after), in protest of his paganism, in fact. The editor of the book, McVey, states that the four "Hymns Against Julian" were "astonishingly vivid and intense invectives" that all were put to the same music. Ephraem was an "eyewitness" to many of the incidents he saw and so his hymns "constitute a significant historical source for the last weeks" of Julian's life.

For example, it was Ephraem's view that the death of Julian (by an assassin, perhaps) had meaning. The emperor's "ignomious death demonstrates the folly of his pride as well as the falsity of his beliefs" (McVey, p. 37). And Ephraem's hymn went like this: "Rely on the truth, my brothers, and be not afraid For our Lord is not so weak as to fail us in the test He is the power on which the world and its inhabitants depend. The hope of His Church depends on Him.

Who is able to sever its heavenly roots? Although the branch is living, on it are dead fruits Blooming only outwardly The wind tried them and cast off the wild grapes." The symbol of the Christian Church in this hymn is the true vine, and the emperor is the dead fruit that the wind has blown off (when he died). Dickinson explains that there were "fourteen hundred and forty-eight religious lyrics" in German language that were written between the years 868 and 1518.

Though half of the authors of those hymns are unknown, but Dickinson claims that some writers are known, including Walther von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg, Heinrich von Loufenberg, Michel Behem, among others (Dickinson, p. 229). "Down to the tenth century," Dickinson continues, the only practice that the Germans engaged in that "could be called a popular church song was the ejaculation of the words Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison" (p. 229).

This phrase was sung "or shouted" by German Christians "on all possible occasions" several hundred years prior to Luther's emergence as a reformer and a leader of the Reformation.

When those German words (meaning, roughly, "Oh give thanks to the Lord, his mercy is good") were sung, they were musically accompanied by "Gregorian tones." In the subsequent years, religious hymns (songs) "multiplied…almost by geometrical progression" and reached a high water mark in the 12th and 13th Centuries -- during the "epoch of the Crusades, the Stauffen emperors, the Minnesingers, and the court epic poets" (Dickinson, p. 230).

Mystics in the 14th Century (like Tauler, Eckart, etc.) wrote hymns with a different tone that had more of a "spiritual quality" and were more subjective. And also in the 14th Century an innovative device was employed -- a device that played "so large a part in the production of the Reformation hymns" -- that consisted of "adapting secular tunes to religious poems." In other words, popular musical tunes were matched up with religious poems to make singing the hymns an easier proposition (Dickinson, p. 232).

And then in the 15th Century, Dickinson goes on, the "popular religious song flourished with an affluence hardly surpassed even in the first tow centuries of Protestantism" (p. 232). Dickinson mentions the "Utraquists" who published a songbook in 1501 and another in 1505 that contained "four hundred hymns" that "antedated the first Lutheran hymnbook by about twenty years" (p. 233).

The pre-Reformation hymns, Dickinson asserts, cast light of "high importance" on the "condition of religious belief among German laity"; they contained messages that were evangelical, noble, pure and yet "mixed with crudity, superstition, and crass realism" (p. 234). Meanwhile, G.B. Sharp writes in The Musical Times that while Luther was a "good amateur musician" himself, he "wisely" left the organizing of musical liturgy to Johann Walter.

The object of Walter's Lutheran compilations (he edited the lyrics and arranged the musical scores) was to "wean German youth away from vulgar songs" (Sharp, 1971, p. 1060). The reason Luther.