Many, many years ago now, when I was studying Music for the Intermediate Certificate (the Irish equivalent of O Levels, loosely speaking), we had a songbook containing 30 or so pieces. Some of those songs lodged in my adolescent head and haven’t been dislodged since. They remain among the tunes that come to me unbidden whenever I feel the urge to hum: The Trout by Schubert, a sea shanty called The Mermaid, Scots Wha Hae…
And then there was In Dulci Jubilo. This last one also provides me with a crystal clear memory of learning a new word for the first time: “macaronic”, used to describe a song lyric made up of fragments from different languages. “In dulci jubilo, now sing with hearts aglow” – and we did in our halting teenage-boyish way, carried along by the lilting rhythm.
The original version, though, was in Latin and German; and how it came to be is quite a tale.
Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso in its anglicised form) was a 14th-century German friar of the Dominican order, a mystic and, by his own estimation, a “Servant (or Servitor) of Eternal Wisdom”. He was a leading light in the Friends of God – the Gottesfreunde – a fellowship of devout, ascetic Rhinelanders who made a stand for love, piety, devotion and holiness, and against the evils and corruption of the day.
For some of his life Seuse practised severe mortification of the flesh: think undergarments studded with brass nails, chastisement with a leather strap, fingers blackened by cold, a tongue cracked by lack of water.
He was prone to visions. The Virgin Mary appeared to him once in the form of a rose. And here is the account in Seuse’s Vita of what occurred on Christmas Eve 1326 (the translation is by the 19th-century convert and Oratorian, Fr Francis Knox):
There came to him a youth, who bore himself as if he were a heavenly musician sent to him by God; and with the youth there came many other noble youths in manner and bearing like the first, save only that he seemed to have some pre-eminence above the rest, as if he were a prince-angel. Now this same angel came up to the Servitor right blithely, and said that God had sent them down to him, to bring him heavenly joys amid his sufferings; adding that he must cast off all his sorrows from his mind and bear them company, and that he must also dance with them in heavenly fashion. Then they drew the Servitor by the hand into the dance, and the youth began a joyous ditty about the infant Jesus, which runs thus: “In dulci jubilo”, etc.
John Rutter, the contemporary English composer of carols, has whimsically speculated on the division of labour between Seuse and his heavenly visitors: “It’s rather nice to think that perhaps the bits sung by the angels were the bits in Latin and the bits in the vernacular would have been sung by Heinrich Suso.”
The tune itself appears for the first time in a German manuscript dated around 1400 and has proved irresistible ever since. By the middle of the 16th century, In Dulci Jubilo had become a mainstay of the Lutheran hymnal, with Martin Luther himself possibly adding some lines to a version published in 1545. Scotsman Robert Wedderburn turned his hand to writing lyrics in English: “Our hartis consolatioun lyis in praesepio.” There is a Latin and Swedish version also from the 1500s.
Bach used it a number of times. Mike Oldfield took an instrumental version, bobbing along on electric guitar licks, to number four in 1976. The Mediæval Bæbes released their take in 2013, almost 687 years after the angels had visited Heinrich Seuse.
However, the choral arrangement par excellence may well be that of Robert Pearsall. Pearsall was born in Bristol in 1795 into a wealthy, originally Quaker family. He was a barrister, not a musician, who emigrated to Germany with his wife and four children in 1825. The marriage broke up in 1842. Pearsall reacted by buying a ruined medieval castle in Switzerland.
He devoted the rest of his life to doing up his newly acquired property; to the art and history of southern Germany and the Alps; and to music, especially Renaissance polyphony.
Though a lifelong Anglican, Pearsall began composing sacred music for the services of nearby Catholic monks. He had a stroke in 1854, following which his wife, Harriet Eliza, returned to care for him until his death two years later.
Pearsall converted to Catholicism in his last days. He died in 1856 and was originally buried in the castle chapel. When the chapel was deconsecrated 101 years later, his remains were reinterred at a church in Wilen-Wartegg, just over the Swiss border from Konstanz, the probable birthplace of Heinrich Seuse.
Make time, then, to listen to In Dulci Jubilo this Christmas. It never disappoints. And take to heart also these lines from another macaronic medieval carol
(anonymous, this one):
Make we joy now in this fest
In quo Christus natus est.
Michael Duggan is a freelance writer
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