Singing the Psalms through adversity: the Czechs

The following appeared in the 11 March issue of Christian Courier as part of my monthly "Principalities & Powers" column. I have, of course, written on this subject before in this space.

In November 1976 I was privileged to visit what was then called Czechoslovakia and its capital city, Prague. Although the communists were still in power and the weather was cold and gloomy during my stay, I fell in love with this beautiful 14th-century urban jewel, which managed to glitter despite the austere Stalin-era buildings at its periphery. As a child I had grown up hearing one of my mother’s favourite musical pieces, Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava, or Moldau, a tone poem dedicated to the river on which Prague is built. Thus I was thrilled finally to walk across the fabled Charles Bridge spanning the waterway that had inspired the 19th-century composer.

For an amateur musician Prague is a treat, as its residents glory in the music of Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, Bohuslav Martinů and many others. Stepping into a church one Sunday I heard a soloist singing two of Dvořák’s Biblical Songs, which I had worked up in my undergraduate voice lessons and had come to love. Dvořák wrote these haunting songs based on the Psalms while in the United States, after learning of the death of his friend and conductor, Hans von Bülow, and of the imminent death of his own father back in Europe. Not surprisingly, the grieving composer turned to the Psalms for comfort.

While in Prague I visited more than one antiquarian book shop, purchasing an 1845 Czech New Testament and Psalms. (In retrospect I’ve come to recognize the irony in my taking a Bible out of a communist country when so many other Christians were taking risks to bring Bibles in.)

But it was another purchase at one of those stores that I keep returning to decades later. This was a small, thick volume called Malý Kancionál, or Little Hymnal, published in 1900 by the Unity of the Brethren, also variously known as the Bohemian Brethren, the Moravian Brethren and the Unitas Fratrum, founded by Jan Hus at the start of the 15th century. On the front cover is a stylized illustration of a chalice, a prominent Husite symbol, stemming from their championing the right of the laity to receive the Eucharistic cup along with the bread to which ordinary believers were at that time restricted. Inside the covers I found a complete metrical psalter, along with some 350 hymns – a psalter hymnal, in short. This sat on my shelf for nearly a decade before I discovered the significance of this book. The 150 Psalms are in fact set to the Genevan tunes, as used in the Swiss, Dutch, Hungarian and other Reformed churches. I had had no idea that Czechs had ever sung these, but obviously some did. Where did they come from?

A few years ago I learned the full story. Jiří Strejc (also known as Georg Vetter, 1536-1599), was a Brethren minister born in Zábřeh in Moravia. Strejc studied in Tübingen and Königsberg, where he came into contact with the Psalter of Ambrosius Lobwasser, a professor of jurisprudence at the university there. Strejc was so favourably impressed by Lobwasser’s German translation of the Genevan Psalter that he decided to model his own Czech versification on it, an undertaking he completed in 1587. Strejc is probably best known for his German-language hymn text, Mit Freuden Zart, familiar in English as Sing Praise to God, Who Reigns Above, the tune to which comes from the Bohemian Brethren’s Kirchengesänge (1566) and bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Genevan Psalm 138. Whether Strejc and Lobwasser ever met I have been unable to determine, but the latter’s psalter would come to influence the liturgical life of Czech protestants by way of Strejc.

The modern Czech Republic is a largely secular society with abysmally low rates of church attendance, a condition undoubtedly exacerbated by four decades of communist misrule. Nevertheless, possessing such a rich heritage in Dvořák’s Biblical Songs and Strejc’s metrical psalter, Czech Christians have a solid basis on which to reinvigorate their country’s tepid church life six centuries after Jan Hus’s abortive efforts at reformation. May God grant that Hus’s work finally come to fruition in the churches of the Czech Republic.

Tim Nijenhuis' Psalms

My Hamilton neighbour Tim Nijenhuis has just completed his own piano arrangements of all of the Genevan Psalm melodies, titled Genevan Melodies for Piano - Omnibus, which is available at his genevatunes.com website. I've not yet seen the collection, but I hope and pray that it will find a receptive readership beyond his own church denomination. I have added his website to the links page of my own website.

Praying the Psalms: a scriptural rosary

Nearly a year and a half ago I wrote of the origins of the rosary, a form of piety long associated with the Roman Catholic Church: The decline of psalm-singing: the rosary. I noted then that the rosary had its origins in the monastic practice of praying the 150 Psalms and called attention to two efforts to reconnect the rosary with the biblical Psalter. Here is another that is worth exploring: The Scriptural Rosary (Psalms), sponsored by Presentation Ministries. Many would, of course, wish to alter the titles of the fourth and fifth glorious mysteries, and perhaps use another Bible translation, but this might just be a form of rosary that even Reformed Christians could profitably pray.

Genevan Psalms in Korean

I have now posted on the links page of my website a link to the Genevan Psalter in the Korean language, along with a passable English translation courtesy of the google translator. The texts, music scores and midi files for the Psalms themselves can be found by clicking on the table on the front page (the layout of which appears, incidentally, to have been patterned after the table on the front page of my own website). The harmonizations are by Claude Goudimel. This now complete collection is a marvellous resource for God's people in Korea. May it serve to advance his kingdom in that extraordinary east Asian country.

Publisher found

Although this is not altogether relevant to the subject matter of this blog, I am nevertheless pleased to announce that my second book, provisionally titled, We Answer to Another: Authority, office and the image of God, will be published by Pickwick Publications, a division of Wipf & Stock in Eugene, Oregon. Here is a brief abstract of the book:

Many observers tend to conflate authority and power, even when they give lip service to the difference between these two, by identifying authority with one or more of the various capacities at our disposal. Similarly many are inclined to view authority and freedom as, if not outright polarities, then dialectically related. By contrast, my argument is that authority is co-extensive with responsible agency and is resident in an office given us at creation. Moreover, when we encounter authority, we encounter nothing less than the image of God, which always points beyond itself. This central authoritative office is in turn manifested in a variety of offices related to the communities of which we are part.

Here is the table of contents as currently projected:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I: INTRODUCTION: DEFINING THE PROBLEM
II: AUTHORITY AND POWER
III: AUTHORITY AND AUTONOMY
IV: AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMACY
V: OFFICE: THE KEY TO AUTHORITY
VI: THE PLURIFORMITY OF AUTHORITY
VII: EPILOGUE: AUTHORITY AND LOVE

These details, including the title, are, of course, subject to modification. I will keep readers posted on the progress of the book as it makes its way through the publication process. Stay tuned.

Update: Psalm 53, 69 and 70

Our friend Jungwon Hwang has posted another performance of a Psalm, this one the 53rd, which is of course virtually identical to Psalm 14.


And two more from Ernst Stolz: Psalms 69 and 70, whose tunes are identical to those of 51 and 17 respectively.

The Huguenot battle anthem: Psalm 68

Ernst Stolz' recording journey through the Psalms has now brought him to Psalm 68, famous as the anthem of the French Reformed Christians in their struggle with their persecutors. This is one of the most durable of the Genevan tunes and seems to have had an influence on the familiar 17th-century tune, LASST UNS ERFREUEN, often paired with the text, All Creatures of Our God and King.

The Hungarian Reformed Church

Many North American Christians are unaware that the Reformation had an impact in east central Europe. Hungary was one of the countries affected by it, and this influence has lasted to the present. The Reformed Church in Hungary has a number of unique characteristics setting it apart from other churches. Its confessional standards are the ecumenical Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession. It is one of only two explicitly Reformed churches to have bishops, although these bishops are little more than district superintendents and make no claim to be in apostolic succession. In fact, as its website puts it, "the church exists in its congregations." It is a member of the World Communion of Reformed Churches. As the map indicates, the Reformed Church encompasses congregations scattered throughout the pre-1920 Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, which extend from the Adriatic in the west to the Carpathian Mountains in the east, and from the borders of Poland in the north to those of Serbia in the south. In Hungary proper Reformed Christians make up the second largest church body after the Roman Catholic Church, while in Romanian Transylvania, they make up the largest Hungarian-speaking church denomination.

Why are Reformed Christians so concentrated in the east? These were the lands controlled by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, whereas western Hungary was under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs. The Habsburgs imposed the Counter-Reformation within their territories, while the Ottoman authorities were rather more tolerant of religious diversity within their lands. (Recall that they had taken in the Jews expelled from Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain in 1492.) Thus the Reformation flourished in the latter but was suppressed in the former.

A dozen years ago I guest lectured at one of Redeemer's sister universities. There I encountered a student in one of the classes who had a Hungarian name but carried a Romanian passport. He was a Reformed Christian who lived in a region of Romania with an ethnic Hungarian majority. Despite his Romanian passport, he told me that he felt himself to be Hungarian, which, as I understand it, is not atypical of the Hungarian-speaking populations in Romania. Thus to be a Reformed Christian in that country brings with it a Hungarian identity as well.

The geographic distance between the Hungarian Reformed and other Reformed Christians is undoubtedly exacerbated by linguistic distance as well. Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language related to Finnish and Estonian but completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages surrounding it in central Europe. I have considerable admiration for such people as Frank and Aria Sawyer, who teach at the Sárospatak Reformed Theological Academy and long ago mastered this difficult language.

In North America the Hungarian Reformed are represented in two bodies: the Hungarian Reformed Church in America and the Calvin Synod, a confessional body within the United Church of Christ. Reformed Christians in Hungary still sing the Genevan Psalms in Albert Szenczi Molnár's 16th-century versifications. If their North American counterparts have given this up, they would certainly do well to re-appropriate a tradition that has served their brethren in the old country so well over the centuries. If they should ever look for a usable English translation, I would be happy to provide them with one, however partial it may be at present.

Incidentally, although I have no known close Hungarian family relationships, my genealogical records indicate that my wife, daughter and I are all lineal descendants of Kings Geza I through Istvan V of Hungary.

Molnár's psalter online

I have recently been alerted to the existence of a scanned copy of the Psalterium Hungaricum of 1607, containing the texts of Albert Szenczi Molnár's Hungarian versifications of the 150 Psalms and the Song of Simeon from Luke 2:29-32. Once you are in the site, click on the OMNIA EX UNO icon until you are at the first Psalm. Then click on the word Fotó at the upper centre of the screen to see the first of the scanned pages. Then click on the right arrow above the image to continue through the scanned volume. This was posted in 2007 in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of this edition.

Update: Goudimel and Martinů

Two more Goudimel arrangements of the Psalms from Ernst Stolz. Psalm 66, of course, has the same melody as Psalms 98 and 118, while Psalm 67 shares its tune with Psalm 33.



The 20th-century composer Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959) composed his Česká rapsodie (Czech Rhapsody), Cantata for Baritone, Mixed Chorus, Orchestra and Organ, H. 118, in 1918. At the end of the following movement Martinů quotes the Genevan tune of Psalm 23. I've not yet heard the entire piece, but I understand that at one point the baritone sings Jiří Strejc's text of this psalm.

Singing the Psalms through adversity: Hungary

The following appeared in the 11 February issue of Christian Courier as part of my monthly "Principalities & Powers" column:

I love the Hungarian people. Among their many national virtues, they boast some of the greatest musicians, such as Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), who did so much to shape 20th-century music by drawing on their country’s unique folk idioms. There is a substantial Reformed Christian minority in Hungary, and they are well known for their love of singing the Psalms. In fact, it can be justly argued that psalm-singing carried them through four decades of communist tyranny.

Last year saw the 450th anniversary of the completion of the Genevan Psalter. Although the Psalter’s texts were originally written in French verse, they were quickly thereafter translated into a number of other languages, including German, Dutch, Czech and Hungarian. The remarkable polymath, Albert Szenczi Molnár (1574-1634), was responsible for the Hungarian version. A pastor, linguist, poet, writer and translator, Molnár (whose surname means miller) was born in Senec (Szenc), near what is today the Slovak capital of Bratislava, and would come to exercise a formative influence on the development of the Hungarian language.

Molnár travelled widely during his life, visiting and studying in a number of European centres associated with the Reformation. His metrical translation of the Psalms was inspired by the German-language Psalter of Ambrosius Lobwasser and was published in Herborn in 1607. (The Reformed Christian legal theorist Johannes Althusius had published his Politics in Herborn a few years earlier but had moved to Emden before Molnár's arrival.) Molnár died in Kolozsvár in Hungarian Transylvania, now Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Amazingly, Molnár is reputed to have completed his translation of the Genevan Psalms in less than 100 days, which must surely set a speed record, given that this would require him to translate at least a psalm-and-a-half per day. Molnár’s texts have stood the test of time and are still sung by Hungarians today. The extent to which they are sung can be judged by the increasing numbers of performances posted to such sites as youtube, the sheer number of which might lead the casual observer to assume that the entire Hungarian nation is organized into hundreds of thousands of choral groups.

One of the best-known of these is the Cantus choir of the Reformed College in Debrecen, a major centre of Reformed Christianity in eastern Hungary. The College was founded in 1538, and the Cantus in 1739. The Cantus has recorded choral performances of the Psalms, including Kodály’s arrangements of Psalms 33, 50, 114, 121, 124, 126 and 150, whose continuing popularity appears to be undimmed by the passing of the years.

Hungary suffered much in the 20th century. In 1920, following its loss in the Great War, it was deprived of nearly three-quarters of its territory, leaving nearly a third of Hungarian-speakers in the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as in a newly enlarged Romania. During the Second World War it suffered under a pro-fascist government, followed by 40 years of communism, interrupted in 1956 by a failed effort at freedom quickly crushed by Soviet tanks. However, once Mikhail Gorbachev ended Moscow’s sphere of influence over its “allies,” Hungary was the first to move towards democracy and to begin dismantling the Iron Curtain.

After the chains of oppression had fallen away, outsiders discovered that Hungarians were still singing from the Genfi zsoltár, their sturdy voices ringing out their complaints, petitions, thanksgivings and praises to God, despite the efforts of an officially atheistic régime at silencing them. Small wonder, then, that many of us admire the Hungarians, so many of whom have persisted in giving voice to God’s Psalms in the face of such adversity.

Isaac Watts: compulsive versifier

It seems that I am not the only person to suffer from the compulsion to versify psalms. Isaac Watts got there first some 300 years ago, as recounted in this article: Isaac Watts, Father of English Hymnody. An excerpt:

From an early age Isaac had a propensity to rhyming, and often even his conversation was in rhyme. His father became quite annoyed at this and told him to stop. When the rhyming persisted, the father started to whip the boy, and little Isaac cried out:

"O father, do some pity take
And I will no more verses make."

Stolz: Psalm 65

Ernst Stolz has posted a delightful performance of Psalm 65, which sounds as if it were composed with recorders in mind.

Then sings my Seoul: Psalm 10

Here is another lovely performance of a psalm in Korean, posted by our friend Jungwon Hwang. We trust that more such performances will be posted in weeks to come.

Stolz: Psalms 62-64

Heidelberg Catechism: another anniversary

Last year marked the 450th anniversary of the completion of the Genevan Psalter, as well as of the English-language Sternhold & Hopkins Psalter. This year we observe the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism, commissioned by Elector Frederick III "the Pious" of the Palatinate and written by Caspar Olevianus (Olewig) and Zacharius Ursinus (Baer) in 1563. Its first question and answer make it one of the most beloved of the Reformation-era catechisms:

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Yes, it's a little on the long side and perhaps not easily memorized. Therefore, in the interest of enabling believers to commit it to their hearts, I here link to my own musical rendition of the first question and answer: I Belong. The text I wrote back in 1986, and the music I composed in 2001. The text follows below:

In life and death, this is my only comfort:
that I belong, in all I do and say,
not to myself, but to my faithful Saviour —
to Jesus Christ, who took my sins away:
with his own blood he made for me atonement
and freed me from the temptor's evil sway.

The Lord provides, for he is very gracious:
he watches over me, therefore I know
that not a hair can from my head be taken
without my Father's willing it be so;
and I believe that all things work together
for my salvation from infernal woe.

Yes, I belong — and this is my true comfort —
to Jesus Christ, who tells me constantly
that I am his and, through his Holy Spirit,
assures me that I'll live eternally;
he makes me want to serve him now and always,
and live in every way obediently.

Then sings my Seoul: Psalms 35 and 40

These are two quite lovely performances of the Psalms in Korean. For both Psalms 35 and 40 a soloist begins and is later joined by another singer in a duet. If I am correctly interpreting the text at 2:42 in the first Psalm, the Korean texts for the Genevan Psalms appear to be of recent vintage. I am grateful that "hwang867" has seen fit to use English captions for our benefit. I hope he will post more such performances in future.

The cattle on a thousand hills

Last evening, as our family was reading a devotional on Psalm 50, I happened to recall a song we had sung when I was growing up: He Owns the Cattle on a Thousand Hills, written by John W. Peterson. Because I could remember only two lines of the song, I had to look it up. Here it is:

He owns the cattle on a thousand hills,
The wealth in every mine;
He owns the rivers and the rocks and rills,
The sun and stars that shine.
Wonderful riches, more than tongue can tell -
He is my Father so they're mine as well;
He owns the cattle on a thousand hills -
I know that He will care for me.

Although the first and seventh lines are an obvious reference to the fiftieth Psalm, the remainder of the song has little to do with it. Although it expresses a valid sentiment, namely, that God cares for us, this is not the point of the psalm, whose main theme is that Almighty God stands in judgement on those who offer the prescribed sacrifices while remaining content to follow their sinful ways. I quote stanzas 4 and 8 from my own versification of Psalm 50:

“For every forest beast belongs to me,
the cattle on a thousand hills, you see,
each bird that soars aloft within the air,
mine are the beasts that wander everywhere.
If I were hungry, why then should you know it,
when earth is mine and everything within it? . . .

“Think on these things, all who will not recall
that I am God, the ruler over all,
lest you incur my wrath eternally;
but those who bring a grateful heart to me
I grant my favour and show my salvation
to those of righteous ways in every nation.”

It's not particularly catchy, and it probably wouldn't have sold well under the old Singspiration label, but it ought nevertheless to be sung in our churches, along with the rest of the biblical Psalter.

Stolz: Psalms 57-61

Judit Lengyel: Psalm 22

Tibor Tóth has posted another psalm performance by Hungarian soprano Judit Lengyel:


Given the great length of this psalm, one cannot help wondering whether this was recorded in one session or whether the singer was allowed to catch her breath between recordings. She shows no discernible signs of vocal fatigue after singing the 16 stanzas. One assumes that congregations do not often sing the entire psalm at more than 17 minutes in length, although they would certainly do so appropriately on Good Friday at least.