St. Albinus

Descant to the hymn tune ST ALBINUS. Audio: hymnal verse - harmonized descant. Free score. 

Henry Gauntlett composed a vast number of hymn tunes, of which ST ALBINUS is one. (Another, notably, is IRBY – Once in royal David's city). Published in 1852, ST ALBINUS was set to a now-fogotten text "Angels to our jubilee." In his original, the dotted note comes on the fifth note, rather than - as now - on the third beat, which has become a signature of this well-regarded tune, which ranges the traditional tessitura of a normal congregation, from B♭ 3  to E♭ 5 . The Easter hymn Jesus lives, thy terrors now is a translation - used with some creative license due to language differences - of Christian Gellert's Jesus lebt, mit ihm auch ich. Gellert was a professor of philosophy at Leipzig, with a career overlapping the life (and tenure at the Thomaskirche) of J.S. Bach. The text is from a 1757 collection of hymns, over 54 of which were penned by Gellert. The translation by Frances Cox appeared first in 1841, in a volume of hymns translated from the German. The first instance of this now inseparable combination first appeared in Hymns for the Church of Christ (Third Thousand) in 1853.

Updated: Spring 2019