Be Still, My Soul: A Song History

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"Be Still, My Soul" began as a German hymn of quiet trust, "Stille, mein Wille, dein Jesus hilft siegen," printed in the collection Neue Sammlung geistlicher Lieder in 1752.[1][2] Few details survive about its author, Katharina von Schlegel. Hymnary.org, citing her correspondence of 1750–52, suggests she belonged to the ducal household at Cöthen rather than to a Protestant convent there, while some hymnologists still propose she became a Lutheran nun, so the sources consulted here differ on her life.[1][2] The English words came from the Edinburgh-born Jane Borthwick (1813–1897), who with her sister Sarah Findlater issued the translation anthology Hymns from the Land of Luther in several series.[3] Her version, covering five of the six German stanzas, appeared in the second series of 1855.[2]

Blue-toned painting of a field near Stockholm leading toward a dark mass of trees under a fading sunset with an evening star

Eugène Jansson, Evening Mood – Lidingö, 1900. Oil on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The melody most congregations now know arrived much later and from an unexpected quarter. In 1899 Jean Sibelius wrote music for a series of patriotic tableaux staged at the Finnish Press Pension Celebration, an event Britannica describes as a barely disguised show of support for Finnish newspapers, then largely under tsarist control.[4] He reworked the final tableau in 1900 into the orchestral tone poem Finlandia, and its broad, chorale-like theme was later lifted out as the hymn tune FINLANDIA.[5] The Welsh musician David Evans joined Borthwick's words to that tune in the Revised Church Hymnary (1927), and the Presbyterian Hymnal of 1933 helped carry the pairing to America.[2][5] The hymn’s words, however, are not Sibelius’s own.[4]

The match of an eighteenth-century German text with a twentieth-century concert melody has proved lasting: Hymnary.org indexes the English text in more than two hundred hymnals, most often with the Sibelius tune.[1][5] It also appears in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam: Gospel Edition, a collection of 68 hymn and gospel arrangements in DAD tuning.[6]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Be Still, My Soul".
  2. Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: Be Still, My Soul".
  3. Hymnary.org: "Jane Borthwick".
  4. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Finlandia".
  5. Hymnary.org: "FINLANDIA".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".