O Sacred Head, Now Wounded: A Song History
The hymn descends from a medieval Latin devotional cycle, Salve mundi salutare, whose seven sections each greet a different part of the crucified Christ's body and were meant for meditation through Holy Week.[1][2] It has long been credited to Bernard of Clairvaux, but sources differ: Hymnary.org names Bernard or the thirteenth-century Arnulf of Leuven, Hymnology Archive gives the cycle to Arnulf and calls the Bernard attribution mistaken, and Discipleship Ministries reports that prevailing opinion still favors Bernard.[1][2][3] According to Hymnology Archive, the stanza addressed to Christ's head was a later addition, inserted in the late fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century it became the opening of the final section.[2] The pastor Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676) turned that section into the German hymn "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden," in ten stanzas, and it was printed in the 1656 edition of Johann Crüger's Praxis Pietatis Melica.[1][2]
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, pen and black ink and graphite on ivory wove paper, 1817. Leipzig's St. Thomas church and school, where Bach had worked a century earlier, shown for his use of the melody; the drawing has no connection to the hymn.
The melody began outside the church: Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612) published it in 1601 in his Lustgarten neuer teutscher Gesäng as a secular love song whose verses spelled out the name Maria.[2][3] It first carried sacred words in 1613, joined to Christoph Knoll's funeral text "Herzlich tut mich verlangen," which gave the tune one of its German names; it is also known as PASSION CHORALE.[4] Gerhardt's text and Hassler's tune have traveled together since 1656.[4] Johann Sebastian Bach returned to the melody several times, including in his St. Matthew Passion, and the harmonies in most modern hymnals are adapted from that work.[2][3]
The familiar English version is chiefly the work of James Waddell Alexander, a Presbyterian minister who translated Gerhardt's German; Hymnology Archive traces its first printing to the New York Observer in April 1830, and it appeared the same year in Joshua Leavitt's The Christian Lyre.[2][3] It remains a Holy Week and Good Friday hymn, found for example as number 286 in The United Methodist Hymnal.[3] Dana Gruber sets it for mountain dulcimer, crediting the melody to Hassler, in Grace, a Fingers Of Steel collection of hymns and reflective songs tabbed for mountain dulcimer, with guitar chords.[5]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded".
- Hymnology Archive: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'O sacred Head, now wounded'".
- Hymnary.org: "PASSION CHORALE".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Dana Gruber, Grace".
- Image: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, pen and black ink and graphite on ivory wove paper, 1817. The Cleveland Museum of Art.