Music notes: II. Sunday of Easter

2020.04.19

‘All glory be to God on high’ is a modern paraphrase of the Gloria in excelsis, the great early Christian hymn of praise that has been part of the Eucharistic liturgy in the West for many centuries. This version by the Episcopal priest-poet Bland Tucker is set to a melody that was written for a similar German Gloria paraphrase, whose author and composer derived the tune quite cleverly from a Gregorian-chant Gloria setting often sung in Eastertide. The German version was written and first sung in the 1520s, but it first appeared in print in an English translation by Myles Coverdale, who in 1535 created the first English-language hymnal by translating many such German religious songs.

Many, many pieces of music have been based on this hymn; this week we hear a charming set of variations written by Sweelinck, a great Dutch composer at the turn of 17th century, as an example for some of his many students (whose efforts follow this piece in the same manuscript), as well as a setting by Georg Böhm, who followed in the tradition established by Sweelinck and in turn probably taught the teenaged J.S. Bach about a hundred years later.

The Gloria begins with the song of good news the angels sang at the birth of Christ. Tucker’s paraphrase returns to the Incarnation in the third stanza, reminding us that the One ‘who was before creation’ also ‘came for our salvation’. Even – and sometimes, especially – in the midst of crisis we can see, and be, signs and means of God’s peace and good will, of self-sacrificial love, and of reckoning what is good and important and what is not. We pray ‘Have mercy, Lord, upon us’ – but we also give ‘thanks and praise’ for the ways in which the world is being saved.