Hymn of the Week: Novemebr 29, 2021
Hymn of the Week: Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
Glory to God 129
Text German Carol 15 stanzas
Music Michael Praetorius 1609
Today’s Hymn of the Week highlights a beautiful and timeless carol. I came across a great article by Robinson Meyer from The Atlantic Monthly that takes a look at various carols both sacred and secular. This is an abridged rendering of his article. Enjoy!
“Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” is an easy carol to write about, because I do not have to convince you it is beautiful. Pull up any choral recording, slide over to the penultimate phrase—“amid the cold of winter”—and listen hard to that last word. Between the first and second syllables of winter, the minor chord blossoms into major.
I mean this seriously: What else is there to say? Here is the chill of winter transfigured into an ardent flame; here is theology as harmony. “Lo, How a Rose” even includes an extended pastoral analogy and an allusion to the Book of Isaiah. I’m not a Christian, but I’m at a loss as to what more you could want from sacred music. Kazoos?
Most Christmas carols, and most of our popular music generally, exist for the rhythm or melody. Consider how much mileage “Angels We Have Heard on High” gets out of its cascading glorias, or how much of the fun of “Carol of the Bells” springs from its icy intervals or insistent tempo. But “Lo, How a Rose” exists for the chords. There is almost no rhythmic variation: The four voices move together, syllable after syllable, in patient homophony. This is a hymn about beholding and listening. It’s about watching revelation flourish.
It’s been about this since the beginning. Many Christmas tunes date back centuries, but what’s striking about “Lo, How a Rose” is that it is old as a coherent piece of music. However ancient it is, “Greensleeves” has changed a lot: The lyrics used to talk about a prostitute; now they talk about Jesus. But “Lo, How a Rose” has pretty much been the same since its inception in the early 17th century.
The tune we now know first appears in a regional hymnal in 1599 as “Es Ist ein Ros Entsprungen.” Michael Praetorius, a court composer in central Germany, wrote the familiar harmonization 10 years later. Such ends the meaningful musical history of “Lo, How a Rose.” There have been a few changes to the text since then—more German
verses were added in the 19th century, and the most common English translation was written in 1894—but essentially none to the music. Hear the song today, in church or in a mall, and you’ll almost certainly hear the exact chords Praetorius picked, in the order he picked them.
Perhaps later generations, less hung up on attention than ours, will find other ways to ornament Praetorius’s score. Maybe their arrangements will dwell less in meditation and more in quickly oscillating rhythm. Yet the core will remain. For more than 400 Decembers, singers have waited on “Lo, How a Rose.” It is a text in sound; it is a set of tones and pauses; it is a cogent path of breath and time.
Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
