![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wachet auf: Sundays after Trinity
Nov. 7th, 2011 01:47 pmYesterday's lection in the RCL was (and has been since the Common Lectionary was introduced) the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins: it's the beginning of a more apocalyptic, or at least judgement-focused, shift in Year A (next up is the parable of the Talents, followed by the Sheep and the Goats on the Sunday Next Before Advent / Feast of Christ the King).
There are really only two hymns I know for the gospel. One was in the old English Hymnal, but is not in the New English Hymnal: it's a 19th-century translation of a Greek 8th-century original, set to a very nice Tallis tune originally composed for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, and isn't the one I'm interested in here[1]. The other is a Philip Nikolai hymn which has been translated into English several times: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The hymn is helped a great deal by the fact that there is a Bach chorale harmonization of the tune, as well as a Cantata (BWV 140) built around it.
The interesting thing is why there's a Lutheran hymn that was major enough for Bach to build a cantata around. Many people these days assume that it was an Advent piece, but the parable has never, to my knowledge, been an Advent lection.[2] Prior to the three-year lectionary in the 20th century it seems to have been a Sunday lection only in the Lutheran order of service.[3]
The Calendar for what is usually referred to as Ordinary Time ("Tempus per Ordinarium") has a problem. The Christian year begins within four days of St. Andrew's Day with the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is essentially, modulo the lunar week, a solar date. But it has a large block of movable time beginning (in the old calendar) with Septuagesima and ending with Corpus Christi (Sacred Heart, if you want to be finicky about it, but Corpus frequently gets transferred to the following Sunday and Sacred Heart doesn't). This block is centred on Easter, which is determined by the relationship between the vernal equinox and the phases of the moon, and it has a range of almost five weeks variability (Septuagesima can be as early as January 19 and as late as Feb 20[4]). Traditionally, this was dealt with by having a long set of Sundays after Epiphany and patching unused ones between the second-last Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity[5] with specified lections (Trinity 24/Pentecost 23) and the Sunday Next Before Advent. (The modern calendar assigns every Sunday at least one date within a week's span, but provides pairs of dates before/after the Easter block, so that Sundays which drop off before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quniquagesima having gone the way of all flesh) reappear right after Pentecost; Sundays at the end of the Church year are therfore always the same for the same year in the three-year cycle.)
The Lutherans seem to have done something different. At some point the German Lutherans (or at least those in Leipzig, although the pattern seems to be rather more widespread) assigned a set of new lections to the end of Trinity season. One of these was the Wise and Foolish Virgins, assigned to Trinity 27 -- which is why Bach wrote a Cantata for the Sunday (and it may very well be why Nikolai chose to use the text as the basis for a Chorale in the first place).
[1] My guess is that it's been dropped because you have to have an extremely serious-minded congregation, these days, to sing a hymn which begins "Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night".
[2]One of the volumes of Carols for Choirs suggests Zion hört, the second verse, as a part of the Advent Carol Service derived from King's College Cambridge.
[3] I'm sure if I hunted around in the old missal I could find it used somewhere, but it's not a Sunday lection.
[4] This means that the extended Christmas cycle, which ends with Candlemas on February 2, can overlap with the extended Easter cycle. Older settings of the propers include a tract as an alternative to the Alleluia for Candlemas for this .
[5]Pentecost for Roman and very advaced Anglo-Catholics; Trinity for Anglicans and Lutherans.
There are really only two hymns I know for the gospel. One was in the old English Hymnal, but is not in the New English Hymnal: it's a 19th-century translation of a Greek 8th-century original, set to a very nice Tallis tune originally composed for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, and isn't the one I'm interested in here[1]. The other is a Philip Nikolai hymn which has been translated into English several times: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. The hymn is helped a great deal by the fact that there is a Bach chorale harmonization of the tune, as well as a Cantata (BWV 140) built around it.
The interesting thing is why there's a Lutheran hymn that was major enough for Bach to build a cantata around. Many people these days assume that it was an Advent piece, but the parable has never, to my knowledge, been an Advent lection.[2] Prior to the three-year lectionary in the 20th century it seems to have been a Sunday lection only in the Lutheran order of service.[3]
The Calendar for what is usually referred to as Ordinary Time ("Tempus per Ordinarium") has a problem. The Christian year begins within four days of St. Andrew's Day with the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which is essentially, modulo the lunar week, a solar date. But it has a large block of movable time beginning (in the old calendar) with Septuagesima and ending with Corpus Christi (Sacred Heart, if you want to be finicky about it, but Corpus frequently gets transferred to the following Sunday and Sacred Heart doesn't). This block is centred on Easter, which is determined by the relationship between the vernal equinox and the phases of the moon, and it has a range of almost five weeks variability (Septuagesima can be as early as January 19 and as late as Feb 20[4]). Traditionally, this was dealt with by having a long set of Sundays after Epiphany and patching unused ones between the second-last Sunday after Pentecost/Trinity[5] with specified lections (Trinity 24/Pentecost 23) and the Sunday Next Before Advent. (The modern calendar assigns every Sunday at least one date within a week's span, but provides pairs of dates before/after the Easter block, so that Sundays which drop off before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quniquagesima having gone the way of all flesh) reappear right after Pentecost; Sundays at the end of the Church year are therfore always the same for the same year in the three-year cycle.)
The Lutherans seem to have done something different. At some point the German Lutherans (or at least those in Leipzig, although the pattern seems to be rather more widespread) assigned a set of new lections to the end of Trinity season. One of these was the Wise and Foolish Virgins, assigned to Trinity 27 -- which is why Bach wrote a Cantata for the Sunday (and it may very well be why Nikolai chose to use the text as the basis for a Chorale in the first place).
[1] My guess is that it's been dropped because you have to have an extremely serious-minded congregation, these days, to sing a hymn which begins "Behold, the bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night".
[2]One of the volumes of Carols for Choirs suggests Zion hört, the second verse, as a part of the Advent Carol Service derived from King's College Cambridge.
[3] I'm sure if I hunted around in the old missal I could find it used somewhere, but it's not a Sunday lection.
[4] This means that the extended Christmas cycle, which ends with Candlemas on February 2, can overlap with the extended Easter cycle. Older settings of the propers include a tract as an alternative to the Alleluia for Candlemas for this .
[5]Pentecost for Roman and very advaced Anglo-Catholics; Trinity for Anglicans and Lutherans.
