Praise the Lord all who honor him
Praise all the gentlemen who honor him is a spiritual morning song and one of the most famous German Lutheran hymns. The ten-verse text with the original opening line Praise the Gentlemen Who Fear Him is by Paul Gerhardt , the melody composed for it by Johann Crüger . He first published it in 1653 in the 5th edition of his hymn book Praxis Pietatis Melica . Today it can be found in most German-language church hymns , including the Evangelical Hymnal (No. 447) and the Catholic Praise for God (No. 81; without stanzas 4, 5 and 9).
text
shape
The poem comprises ten stanzas with three eleven-syllable and one five-syllable line based on the example of the Sapphic stanza, which is often imitated in German humanism and baroque .
The rhyme scheme chosen by Gerhardt is unusual [aabbx], which divides the first line in half and leaves the verse-like final line “Praise the Lord” without rhyme. It is striking that Gerhardt deviates from this scheme in the first stanza, in which the words “gentlemen” and “fear” remain without rhyme. All newer hymnbooks put “honor” at the end of the first line and thereby establish the formal analogy, but at the price of a tautology of “praise” and “honor”.
content
The regularly recurring line “Praise the Lord” corresponds to the biblical call Hallelujah , which is at the same time an invitation to praise God and its fulfillment. Gerhardt turns this call into morning prayer and motivates him in stanzas 2–5 with thanks for being protected from various real dangers of the night; This may also be based on experiences from the Thirty Years' War . Verses 6–9 are a prayer for further protection and for keeping on the path of the divine commandments in anticipation of the coming ("your future") and judgment of Christ. This eschatological horizon is expressly the content of the confessional closing stanza.
text
Original version (1660) | Common text today (EG 447) |
---|---|
Praise the Lord / All / who fear him / |
Praise the Lord, all who honor him; |
melody
Johann Crüger's C major corresponds to the positive and trusting mood of the text. Alternating between quarters and halves, it balances the floating rhythm of the sapphic stanza to the even time signature.
inIn Crüger's own editions of the Pietatis Melica practice, a figured bass is added to the melody . There she herself has an additional baroque expressiveness through the leading tones F sharp in the first line and C sharp in the second line; these have been deleted in the current version. The syncope to the A minor final cadence of the third line has also been erased - through the introduction of a melisma .
literature
- Andreas Marti : 447 - Praise all gentlemen who honor him . In: Wolfgang Herbst , Ilsabe Seibt (Hrsg.): Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch . No. 15 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-50339-3 , p. 84–90 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. the hymns of the Dearest Heart of Jesus, what have you committed by Johann Heermann and Praise the Lord and thank him for his gifts by Bartholomäus Ringwaldt