Fairest Lord Jesus: A Song History

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The German hymn Schönster Herr Jesu first appears in a 1662 Jesuit manuscript from Münster, Westphalia, and was first printed in the Catholic Münster Gesangbuch of 1677.[1] Discipleship Ministries records no author for it, while Hymnary.org calls the original text anonymous but also lists the Jesuit priest Friedrich von Spee as an author.[1][2] The melody now sung with it came much later: Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben and E. F. Richter printed the words with a Silesian folk tune in Schlesische Volkslieder (1842), and text and tune have been linked ever since.[2] Hoffmann claimed to have heard haymakers in the Glatz region singing the tune, and he gave it the name ASCALON.[1]

Painting of Christ facing forward in a red and blue robe, raising one hand in blessing and holding an orb

Albrecht Dürer, Salvator Mundi, oil on linden, ca. 1505. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The English text "Fairest Lord Jesus" first appeared in Richard Storrs Willis's Church Chorals and Choir Studies (1850); the translation itself is anonymous.[2] Willis renamed the melody CRUSADERS' HYMN on the assumption that soldiers had sung it on the road to Jerusalem.[1] That story is a legend: Discipleship Ministries calls the assumption false, and Hymnary.org finds no factual support for a crusader origin of text or tune.[1][2] The earlier name ASCALON refers to the place where the First Crusade fought its last battle.[1] Franz Liszt used the tune in the crusaders' march of his oratorio The Legend of St. Elizabeth, where French horns introduce it, though the two sources consulted here date the work differently (1862 and 1864).[1][2] The Episcopal Hymnal 1982 named the tune ST. ELIZABETH after that oratorio, and many hymnal committees have dropped the Crusades name.[1]

A second English version, "Beautiful Savior," by the Lutheran pastor Joseph A. Seiss, appeared in 1873.[1] Hymnary.org counts the hymn in well over six hundred hymnals.[2] Linda Brockinton closes My Daily Prayer, a dulcimer album sold as a download of 20 MP3 tracks, with it.[3]

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Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: Fairest Lord Jesus".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of All Nature".
  3. Linda Brockinton: "My Daily Prayer".
  4. Image: Albrecht Dürer, Salvator Mundi, oil on linden, ca. 1505. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.