Music Notes for Sunday, June 1, 2025

Music for Seventh Sunday in Easter

Missa in A major (Op. 126) – Josef Rheinberger (1839 – 1901)

Although Josef Rheinberger is not one of the 19th century’s “big names”, he should be. He was almost exactly contemporaneous with Johannes Brahms. Rheinberger had an unusually successful career spanning more than 45 years and encompassing nearly 200 published compositions. In the early part of his career, he also built an illustrious reputation as a virtuoso pianist and organist. Later in life he became a sought-after teacher of composition as well as the organ.

Though he was born in the principality of Lichtenstein, Rheinberger spent nearly his entire life in Munich — first as a student, then as a virtuoso and promoter of opera, and finally 33 years as professor of counterpoint and organ at the Royal School of Music. His writing contains elements of the chromaticism characteristic of Bruckner’s motets and the gently contoured melodic features and tightly-knit harmonic style of Stanford. This Sunday’s setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in church (his Opus 126) for sopranos and altos exhibits Rheinberger’s own straightforward yet extremely effective treatment of texts, highlighted by his masterful use of harmony and rhythmic inflection to colour and inform the phrases.

Gerald Harder

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Music Notes for Sunday, May 25, 2025

Music for Sixth Sunday of Easter

Father, We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted – Text: Didache (1st or 2nd century); tr. Francis Bland Tucker (1895-1984) / Music: Melody Genevan Psalter 1549; composed or adapted by Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510-61)

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The text of this Sunday’s communion hymn in church, Father, We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted, is rooted in the early Christian church, all the way back to the Greek-language Didache (the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), a Christian manual from the Church of Antioch, Syria, which some scholars date as early as 110 C.E. To produce this text, Francis Bland Tucker (1895-1984) translated selected prayers from chapters 9 and 10 of the Didache. Some scholars are of the opinion that part of it, notably the prayers from which this hymn is derived, may be much older than the main work and come from the same source as the Gospel canticles.

Les Commandemens, the tune to which this hymn is most frequently sung, is one of the most widely known tunes adapted or composed by Louis Bourgeois (c. 1510-61). It derives its name from the fact that it was used in several hymnals and psalters as a musical setting for the Ten Commandments. After 1556 the tune came into the English and Scottish psalters with versions of the Commandments and Psalm 125. In the 19th century the tune appeared in England, altered to notes of equal length. Vaughan Williams restored the original rhythm in The English Hymnal 1906. The tune appears in this restored form in both our Common Praise and New English Hymnal collections, with slight variations.

Father, we thank Thee who hast planted
Thy holy name within our hearts.
Knowledge and faith and life immortal
Jesus thy Son to us imparts.

Thou, Lord, didst make all for thy pleasure,
didst give us food for all our days,
giving in Christ the bread eternal;
Thine is the pow’r, be Thine the praise.

Watch o’er Thy church, O Lord, in mercy,
save it from evil, guard it still.
Perfect it in Thy love, unite it,
cleansed and conformed unto Thy will.

As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,
was in this broken bread made one,
so from all lands thy church be gathered
into thy kingdom by thy Son.

Gerald Harder

 

 

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