Like the hymn before it, “Comfort, Comfort Ye My People” was written for St. John the Baptist’s Day rather than for Advent. Johann Olearius, general superintendent of the Lutheran church in Weissenfels and Halle and a survivor of the Thirty Years’ War, wrote Tröstet, tröstet meine Lieben as a direct paraphrase of Isaiah 40:1–8, the very Old Testament reading appointed for John’s festival; that same chapter of Isaiah anchors Advent’s own Gospel of the voice crying in the wilderness, so the hymn migrated naturally into this season. Olearius published it in 1671 in his own hymnal, Geistliche Singe-Kunst, a collection of 1,218 hymns of which he wrote some 300 himself. Its tune, familiar today as FREU DICH SEHR, began life as Louis Bourgeois’s setting of Psalm 42 in the 1551 Genevan Psalter, and its lively, dotted rhythm is easily lost if sung too much like a solemn quarter-note chorale. Catherine Winkworth’s 1863 translation carries Isaiah’s own comfort straight into English, and as Gaudete’s Hymn of the Day it puts Isaiah’s twofold nachamu, “comfort, comfort,” directly into the mouths of the congregation.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025