A new song we're lifting
A new song wir lifts up (Original Eyn newes song wir lifts up ) is probably the oldest surviving song by Martin Luther . It was first printed in 1524 and describes the deaths of the first Protestant martyrs in Brussels.
Emergence
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Martyrium_von_Johann_Esch_und_Heinrich_Voes_%28Ludwig_Rabus_1554%29.jpg/220px-Martyrium_von_Johann_Esch_und_Heinrich_Voes_%28Ludwig_Rabus_1554%29.jpg)
The song was probably written in 1523 and was inspired by the martyrdom of the two Augustinian monks Hendrik Vos and Johannes van Esschen , who converted to the Reformation, and which deeply moved Luther. Both were executed at the stake on July 1, 1523 in Brussels .
The song first appeared in print in the Erfurt Enchiridion in 1524. There it has ten stanzas (1-8, 11 and 12). In the later prints, stanzas 9 and 10 are added. Lucke suspects that these stanzas were not intended as insertions by Luther, but were intended to replace the two older closing stanzas (now 11 and 12).
Characteristic
The song is designed in the style of a petty chant and was not intended for worship.
The form and language of the song suggest that it originated in the summer of 1523 shortly after the events described and before all other surviving songs. In Es wants God to be gracious to us (1524) and in one of his latest songs, Christ, our Lord, came to the Jordan (1541), Luther took up the same stanza form again.
Luther describes the testimony and joyful death (stanza 8) of the two Augustinians as a fight and victory over the devil , the "old enemy", and his "larvae play" (stanzas 3–5). He calls his trustees, the representatives of the old faith, “ sophists ”, meaning a speculative scholasticism that is remote from the Bible . The accused are indeed deprived of their authority to ordain (stanza 5), but it is precisely through their self-sacrifice for the truth of Christ that they become “true priests ” (stanza 6). As the core of the “error” for which the two were burned, he formulates, without explicit reference to his doctrine of justification : “One has to believe God alone, man always lies and deceives, one should not trust anything” (Verse 7). The younger closing stanzas 9 and 10 as well as the older 11 and 12 express with different accents the conviction that the attempt to silence the two evangelical teaching monks will help the word of God and the cause of the Reformation to victory.
text
Original text
Eynn hubsch Lyed von denn zcweyen Marterern Christi, burned |
Orthographically modernized version A lovely song by the two martyrs of Christ, |
1. Eyn newes lyed wyr begin, |
1. We begin a new song, may |
melody
The melody, which, as it were, calls out the news of the double martyrdom in the marketplace, is, like the text, the work of Martin Luther. It shows typical characteristics of his later sages. The final line has been handed down in two versions. tonic , in Johann Walters Geistliches Gesangbüchlein on the dominant . Moser gives preference to the first version, to which Walter later switched, and considers the second to be a variant that leads on to the next stanza of the narrative song, which was actually conceived as a soloist.
the Erfurt enchiridion ends on theliterature
- Otto Schlißke: Handbook of Luther songs . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1948
- Wilhelm Lucke: We are starting a new song . In: D. Martin Luther's works. Critical Complete Edition , Volume 35, Weimar 1923, pp. 91–97 , on the melody pp. 487–488 ( Hans Joachim Moser )
Web links
- Recording of the song on Luther2017.be
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Lucke pp. 93-94
- ↑ WA 35, pp. 411-415 ; the verse count is added.
- ↑ Gen 4,10 LUT
- ^ Wiktionary Pious
- ↑ p. 488