Called the “Lutheran Communion hymn par excellence,” this text began as a one-stanza Leise in the late fourteenth century, traced to manuscript evidence at the Cistercian convents of Medingen and St. Maria Magdalena near Lüneburg. Around 1524, Luther expanded it with two new stanzas of eucharistic theology and in his 1526 German Mass listed it as one of three ideal hymns for singing during the distribution of the body and blood of Christ. Its popularity was staggering: it was prescribed in more German Lutheran church orders than any hymn except Luther’s creedal paraphrase “We All Believe in One True God.” The ultimate testament to its power is that the Roman Catholic author Johann Leisentritt included it in his 1567 Catholic hymnal Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen—with Luther’s Protestant text intact. The tune is an anonymous fifteenth-century cantio that musicologists have traced to Thomas Aquinas’s great Corpus Christi sequence Lauda Sion salvatorem.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026