This hymn began as a summertime dance. Johann Walter, Luther’s musical collaborator and the first Lutheran kantor, took a Saxon mining-country folk song called a Bergreihen, a “mountain line dance,” whose words ran “My heart is feeling joyful this happy summertime... the lark proclaims her brightest song.” Walter kept the opening almost intact and then turned it inside out: “My heart is feeling joyful this happy summertime, for God is now preparing all things eternally. The heavens and the earth our God will make anew.” It may well be the first Lutheran hymn written on the Last Things, a subject Lutheran poets would go on to make their own. Walter wrote thirty-three stanzas; congregations sang all of them for the better part of a century until Melchior Franck cut it to seven in 1627, dropped the summertime opening, and pointed the whole hymn at the ten virgins. Germany still sings Walter’s folk tune. America does not, because it was missing from the chorale book our forebears used, so in 1912 the Missouri Synod’s first English hymnal borrowed a melody from Praetorius — who had himself borrowed it from an English court song of 1601 called “I care not for these ladies.”
Sung at Our Saviour
2025