From Heavenly Harmony
Not Just a One-Hit Wonder
by Ken Myers
If the name of the composer Hans Leo Hassler is recognized at all, it is probably in connection with a melody frequently sung and heard during Holy Week. In hymnals, the tune is often identified as the Passion Chorale, and it is the melody to which we sing the Passiontide hymn, “O sacred Head, now wounded.” The tune first appeared in print in 1601, in a collection of secular songs by Hassler. The text that originally accompanied that tune was a wistful five-stanza song of unrequited love, Mein G’muth ist mir verwirret. The opening lines of that sad ballad lamented: “My mind’s confused within me, made thus by a tender maiden. I am utterly astray. My heart hurts badly.” And so on, for five anguished stanzas.
Ten years after that song was published, the melody was appropriated for use with another downcast poem, this time an eleven-stanza Lutheran hymn, Herzlich tut mich verlangen, “My heart is filled with longing.” The grief in this case was a response to severe physical torment and a sense of futility occasioned by an outbreak of plague. The poet longs to leave the prison of all-too-mortal flesh and be united with God, clothed in a body “transfigured in beauty through Christ.” The melody that Hassler wrote with the intent of expressing the melancholy of failed romance was repurposed to convey a much deeper hope within the context of a more severe suffering.
More than 40 years after Hassler’s death, another Lutheran composer, Johann Crüger, realized that Hassler’s melody had within it the capacity to communicate a still more intense emotional state: the contemplation of the sufferings of Christ on the cross. Crüger was aware of a ten-stanza hymn written by pastor and poet Paul Gerhardt: O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, “O Head full of blood and wounds.” In the hymn, written in the first person, a believer meditates on the horror of Christ’s suffering—for which the guilty sinner is responsible—and the hope and comfort this grisly death made possible.
In the 1656 edition of his popular hymnal Praxis pietatis melica, Crüger perceptively linked Gerhardt’s pious text with Hassler’s poignant tune, and the Passion Chorale was born. Lutheran congregations began singing this melody during Holy Week (as do many congregations of various churches to this day), and a century later, Bach would employ this tune five times at critical points in his magisterial St. Matthew Passion.
Working in Two Idioms
If Hans Leo Hassler had written nothing but that single melody, the Church would be extremely grateful. But at the time of his death in 1612, he left behind a significant catalog of sacred choral music for which many choirs and worshipers are (or at least should be) grateful.
Born into a musical family in 1564 in Nuremburg, Hassler’s early musical training exposed him to the most accomplished art of the Flemish Renaissance composers, especially the work of Orlande de Lassus (see my “Eloquent Lamentation” in the March/April 2018 Touchstone). At the time, composers from the Lowlands were universally regarded as the greatest masters of complex choral composition. But beginning around 1550, a number of composers working in Venice were experimenting with new compositional techniques that exploited the unique acoustic characteristics of the Basilica San Marco, today a popular tourist site. The spacious interior with its many lofts invited compositions with multiple choirs—including voices and instruments—that could echo and converse with one another. This “polychoral” technique—eventually perfected in the early seventeenth century by Claudio Monteverdi—has a brighter and more vivacious quality than the more contemplative and “mathematical” style of the Flemish masters.
Hassler learned to work in both idioms. In 1584, at the age of 20, having already become an accomplished organist, he went to Italy to study with one of the Venetian masters, Andrea Gabrieli. A year later, he accepted a position as organist in Augsburg, serving in the chapel of a prominent merchant family. As musicologist Carl Schalk summarizes, in returning to Germany, Hassler “opened the door for the new breezes blowing from the south.” Later German (and, not unimportantly, Lutheran) composers would eventually develop that musical vocabulary, thereby moving German church music (in Schalk’s words) “into paths which would ultimately culminate in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.”
Presenting the Divine Dance
A superb introduction to Hassler’s “Flemish style” is available on a 1992 recording by the Ensemble Vocal Européen under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe. This album features Hassler’s Mass setting Missa super Dixit Maria. Each movement of this Mass uses the musical elements from Hassler’s Annunciation motet, Dixit Maria ad angelum, with its text from St. Luke 1:38: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.” There is none of the Venetian flash and glory here; direct melodies are enhanced by warm harmonies, evocative of Mary’s simple obedience.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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