I want to love you, my strength
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I want to love you, my strength is a spiritual poem by Johann Scheffler ( Angelus Silesius ), which is included with various melodies in the most important German-language church hymn books. Scheffler first published it in 1657 in his volume of poems Heilige Seelen-Lust .
text
shape
Scheffler's poem comprises eight six-line iambic stanzas in bar form with the rhyme scheme [ababcc]. The tunnels consist of two four-word lines with female and male rhyme , the swan song of a four-word line and a three-word line with male rhyme. The shortening of the final line gives it a currency-like emphasis.
content
The poem is part of the collection Heilige Seelen-Lust or spiritual shepherd songs The psyche in love with JESUM , a religious shepherd poem in which the soul ("I") has the role of the shepherdess and Jesus the role of the shepherd. At the same time it stands in the tradition of the Christological interpretation of the Song of Songs . In the case of I want to love you , this is made explicit by the original heading “She [the soul] promises to love him bit in death”.
The first two stanzas are the actual declaration of love. No fewer than seven of the twelve lines begin with the words “I want to love you”. The spiritual dimension is only clearly expressed through the address " God's lamb " at the end of the second stanza; only the Bible connoisseur hears Psalm 18,2 LUT in the opening line . The third and fourth stanza with the Song of Songs motif of mourning and searching ( Hld 5,6 LUT ) could still be understood as “this world” if the “highest good” in contrast to the “created light” did not reveal the divine addressee. The “late” reversal from temporal to eternal “beauty” described here with Augustinian phrases ( Confessiones 10, 27 and 34) can also be understood as a reflection of Scheffler's conversion to the Catholic Church in 1653 . The verses 5, 6 and 7 are thanks for the blissful "heavenly bliss" and a request for preservation on the way in the "heavenly shine"; erotic images appear again in verse 7, which is probably therefore missing in all newer hymn books. The last stanza repeats the promise of the first with similar phrases and deepens it around the motif of wagelessness and self-sufficiency of the love of God.
text
| Original version (1657) | Common text today ( EG 400, GL 358) |
|---|---|
|
She promises to love Him bitterly in death. |
1. 7. |
Melodies
Is there a in the first print with figured bass by the Wroclaw composer Georg Joseph , whose three-bar underlines the bucolic character of the poem and which, especially in the first stanza, expressively emphasizes the meaningful words. Unlike most bar- stanza melodies, it does not repeat the opening lines. It compensates for the shortening of the final line with a five-tone melisma , which is more suitable for solo singing and was later made easier in some hymn books by adding two text syllables.
The text was sung with other melodies early on. The straight-bar , published in 1738 in Johann Balthasar Königs Harmonischem Liederschatz with its opening triad ascent to the upper octave.
reception
Despite Scheffler's decidedly and polemically represented Catholicism, I want to love you was first and quickly included in evangelical song collections. There it shared with other songs the fate of more or less successful text changes at the turn of the 19th century, before it was almost originally, with the melody from 1738, included in the Evangelical Church Hymn of 1950 and the Evangelical Hymn of 1993 (No. 400) has been.
In the Catholic area, where congregational chanting had little space in the public liturgy, I will love you only found its way into individual hymn and prayer books in the 19th century. The hymn from 1938, where it was linked again with Georg Joseph's melody, then heralded its breakthrough. It is contained in Praise of God (1975) and Praise of God (2013) (No. 358).
Peter Cornelius (1824–1874) composed a six-part motet on three stanzas freely compiled from Scheffler's text (op. 18,2).
Translations
Translated into Danish, "Dig vil jeg elske, du min styrke ..." by Eiler Hagerup 1725, newly translated by Egede Glahn in 1863 and in this version incorporated into the Danish church hymn book, Den Danske Salmebog , Copenhagen 1953, no. 589, and in Den Danske Salmebog , Copenhagen 2002, no.681.
literature
- Hermann Kurzke : I want to love you, my strength . In: Geistliches Wunderhorn. Great German hymns . Ed., Presented and explained by Hansjakob Becker u. a. Munich 2001, pp. 291-298.
- Martin Rößler : 400 - I want to love you, my strength . In: Wolfgang Herbst , Ilsabe Seibt (Hrsg.): Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch . No. 15 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-50339-3 , p. 55–62 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Web links
- Michael Fischer: I want to love you, my strength (2007). In: Popular and Traditional Songs. Historical-critical song lexicon of the German Folk Song Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ text (German)
- ↑ Text source
- ↑ Spelling according to GL
- ↑ GL 1975 : "that died on the trunk of the cross"
- ↑ ECG : "recognizes"
- ↑ EKG: "and not rather call you mine"
- ↑ GL 1975: "on"
- ↑ EKG and EG: exclamation mark
- ↑ EKG and GL 1975: "special"
- ↑ Text ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Cf. Otto Holzapfel : Lied index: The older German-language popular song tradition ( online version on the Volksmusikarchiv homepage of the Upper Bavaria district ; in PDF format; ongoing updates) with further information.
