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Wittenberg Nightingale

Luther teaching hymns. From The Life of Luther in Forty-Eight Historical Engravings. Gustav König (1808-1869). Courtesy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Music played a central role in the early Lutheran church, in part because Luther himself was a music lover. As a boy, he was trained to sing in a Kurrende – a chorus that offered its services door to door for holidays, weddings and funerals. He sang for the rest of his life, and also showed considerable skill on the lute and recorder. When Luther began reforming worship in the German church, he saw music as one of the best ways to inspire believers. “Whether you wish to comfort the sad, to subdue frivolity, to encourage the despairing, to humble the proud, to calm the passionate or to appease those full of hate,” he wrote, “what more effective means than music could you find?” Just as he believed the Scriptures were for everyone to read, he thought everyone should sing as part of religious worship.

The German Mass
Before Luther’s time, the Catholic Mass in Germany was sung by the priest and choir in Latin, with a few hymns and simple parts of the service, such as the Lord’s Prayer, sung or spoken in German. But in the 1520s, religious leaders began composing musical settings for an all-German Mass. At the urging of friends, Luther published a German Mass of his own in 1526, with the help of court musicians Conrad Rupsch and Johann Walther. As he wrote the text for the Deutsche Messe, he was careful about combining words and music. He also composed some of the score, singing and playing melodies on the recorder as Walther notated. Luther wanted the Mass to be sung by all believers, not just the priest, so he stressed simplicity in both language and music.

At his own church in Wittenberg, Luther continued to perform the Latin Mass, but he also encouraged the congregation to take part in the service by expanding the role of German chorales, or hymns. Luther published his first hymnal, the Achtliederbuch, in 1524, and a total of nine hymnals during his lifetime. They featured translations of Latin chorales, popular German religious songs and religious lyrics set to secular tunes. They also included some 38 hymns from Luther’s own pen – though for many he may have borrowed or adapted existing melodies. Luther asked his musician friends to compose four-part settings for these and other hymns.

Hymn from the Achtliederbuch, 1524.

A Mighty Fortress
Luther hoped to persuade Christians to embrace “the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy and costly treasure given to mankind by God.” By all accounts, he was successful. His best-known chorale, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God), became a kind of battle hymn of the Reformation. This and other Lutheran tunes not only filled church sanctuaries but also spilled into streets and village squares. “Luther’s hymns have led more souls to perdition than all his books and sermons,” wrote one enemy of the Protestant church. A more sympathetic voice, Nuremberg poet Hans Sachs, described Luther’s reforms as “the singing of the Wittenberg nightingale.”

Since Luther’s day, hymns have become an anchor of Protestant tradition. In Germany, they have flourished under the hands of such gifted composers as Johann Sebastian Bach. In the United States, they have supported historic movements, from the fight to end slavery to the Civil Rights protests led by Martin Luther King. A revolutionary leader himself, Luther may have guessed their power when he said he would like to see “all the arts, especially music, used in the service of Him who gave and made them.”

Links

German and English lyrics to “Ein’ feste Burg”