We sing this one twice today, in different stanzas, and no hymn fits the parable of the wedding garment better. Johann Franck, a lawyer and later mayor of Guben, wrote Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele around 1649, in the wreckage left by the Thirty Years’ War. He had watched plague, famine, and occupation pass through his town, and rather than cataloguing the ruin he turned inward and wrote about joy. The soul is told to leave the “gloomy haunts of sadness” and dress for a banquet, imagery drawn straight from the wedding feast our Gospel describes, setting human unworthiness against sheer divine invitation. Johann Crüger, cantor in Berlin, gave it the melody and printed it in his Praxis Pietatis Melica, the hymnal that set the standard for German Protestant song. Bach loved the chorale, building his 1724 cantata BWV 180 on it and setting it among the Great Eighteen as an organ prelude (BWV 654) whose ornamented, floating line is itself an act of adorning. More than a century later Mendelssohn played that prelude for Robert Schumann, who wrote afterward that Mendelssohn had told him if life ever robbed him of hope and faith, this one chorale would restore them. Catherine Winkworth brought it into English in 1858.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026