Nicolaus Herman, cantor and schoolmaster at Joachimsthal in Bohemia, wrote this hymn for his own students at the urging of his pastor and friend Johann Mathesius, a close confidant of Luther. Its first two stanzas appeared around 1550 to 1555 in a small Leipzig collection made for Herman’s schoolchildren, and in the single surviving copy of that first printing the typesetter accidentally substituted the ending of an entirely different hymn in a different meter after the second stanza. Herman corrected the error and expanded the text to eight stanzas in his own 1560 collection of the church year’s Gospels. The English text sung today is a composite spanning more than a century: August Crull translated the second stanza in 1889, and F. Samuel Janzow translated the remaining stanzas and added a new seventh for the Missouri Synod’s 1969 Worship Supplement. Herman also composed the tune himself, and the hymnologist Fred Precht praised its word-painting: a rising leap of a fifth on the opening “Lobt Gott” and a matching high note landing on both “alle,” all, and “hochsten,” highest. Grounded in Luke 2:20, where the shepherds return praising God, it sends the congregation out from the First Sunday after Christmas in that same posture, giving thanks and speaking of the Child as Simeon and Anna once did in the Temple.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025