Music Notes for Sunday, February 23, 2025

 

Music for the Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany

Praise to the Holiest in the Height – Text: John Henry Newman (1801-1890) / Music: John Bacchus Dykes (1823-1876)

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Reflecting upon the death of an acquaintance, John Henry Newman wrote a poem entitled The Dream of Gerontius. Six stanzas from the poem, beginning “Praise to the holiest”, unaltered except for the repetition of stanza 1, were printed in the 1868 supplement to Hymns Ancient & Modern. Since then, nearly every hymnal has chosen it. It is the offertory hymn this Sunday in church.

The son of a banker, Newman was educated at Ealing and at Trinity College, Oxford. He Became vicar at St Mary’s, Oxford, in 1828, and while there became associated with Keble, Pusey and others in the Oxford Movement. Despite the scathing attacks made upon his religious sincerity following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman left the memory of a great saint, a master of English prose, and a very fine poet. The tune Gerontius was composed to Newman’s words by John Bacchus Dykes for Hymns Ancient & Modern.

PRAISE to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise,
In all his words most wonderful,
Most sure in all his ways.

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail;

And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God’s presence and his very self,
And essence all-divine.

O generous love! that he who smote
In Man for man the foe,
The double agony in Man
For man should undergo;

And in the garden secretly,
And on the cross on high,
Should teach his brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise,
In all his words most wonderful,
Most sure in all his ways.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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Music Notes for Sunday, February 16, 2025

 

Music for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

Praeludium in D major (BuxWV 139) – Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707)

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Dieterich Buxtehude was a Danish or German organist and composer of church music, one of the most esteemed and influential composers of his time. Buxtehude settled at Lübeck in 1688 as organist of St Mary’s church. There he gained such fame as a composer that the city became a mecca for musicians of northern Germany. The young Handel visited him in 1703, and in 1705 young Bach walked more than 200 miles to see him. Both young men hoped to succeed the master at Lübeck, but marriage to one of his daughters was a condition and each found this unacceptable.

Buxtehude’s most important and influential works are considered to be those for organ. The Praeludium in D major, this Sunday’s organ postlude in church, opens with a twenty-bar introduction whose extemporary style might suggest an organist exploring an unfamiliar instrument before settling to his task. There follows a four-voice fugue on a subject in which a repeated note prominently features; a sustained passage in which Buxtehude demonstrates a knowledge of complex harmony; and the lively, toccata-like section (interrupted by another sustained passage) with which the piece concludes. Thus ‘prelude and fugue’, the phrase commonly used to describe such works by Buxtehude, is not entirely apt, for instead of a clear-cut division into two substantial movements of more or less equal length, there is a succession of relatively short passages, strict fugal writing alternating with sections of an improvisatory character, some of them lively and harmonically straightforward, some stately and harmonically complex.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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