The king of chorales was written in a town that was burying itself. Philipp Nicolai came to Unna in Westphalia in 1596; within a year plague killed more than 1,400 of its 2,500 people, and he was burying thirty a day. His letters to his brother mark the progress: three hundred dead by August, then a hundred seventy in a single week, the churchyard beside his house giving off “an evil-smelling vapor,” twelve hundred by October. He kept himself going on prayer, absinthe, juniper, mugwort, incense, and whatever the apothecary in Dortmund could send. In the middle of that he was writing a book of comfort on Romans 8:18, the Mirror of the Joys of Eternal Life, and in its appendix he placed four hymns arranged as a journey: the soul longing for heaven, the soul greeting the Bridegroom at the feast, the soul taking leave of the world, the soul at rest. Ours is the second. Nicolai wrote the tune as well; the nineteenth century crowned it the king of chorales and gave the queen’s crown to his “O Morning Star, how fair and bright.” Bach set all three stanzas in Cantata 140 for this very Sunday in 1731, and the countermelody he wove under stanza 2 is now better known than the hymn itself.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025