Luther's Chorales Reshaped Music, From Bach to Brecht
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Martin Luther, a musician who played lute and flute, composed simple hymn tunes in everyday German with block-chord harmonization so that even illiterate worshippers could sing along, replacing Latin liturgy performed by clergy with participatory congregational singing.
- Luther's most famous chorale, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, dates from around the 1521 Diet of Worms and is still sung in churches worldwide; he is credited with the spirit of the line "Why should the devil have all the best tunes?" even though he almost certainly never said it.
- Luther's chorales spread rapidly through Gutenberg's movable-type printing press (invented roughly 60 years earlier), and in 1524 in Magdeburg crowds sang them in protest against the selling of indulgences before Luther himself arrived to preach.
- Elisabeth Cruciger, a nun from Pomerania who abandoned her holy orders to follow Luther, contributed the hymn Lord Christ, the only son of God to one of the first Lutheran hymnals.
- Johann Sebastian Bach, a lifelong Lutheran church musician living 200 years after Luther, composed hundreds of chorale harmonizations and wove familiar tunes into elaborate organ chorale preludes that depended on congregants already knowing the melodies.
- Lutheran chorales echoed through 20th-century culture: the Swingle Singers' jazz arrangement of Wachet Auf, Myra Hess's wartime Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring at London's National Gallery concerts, Julius Eastman's pounding minimalist Gay Guerilla, and the unison chorale that closes Brecht and Weill's 1928 Threepenny Opera.
- The article surfaces an angle often glossed over: Luther wrote "virulently antisemitic texts" that "were a reference point for negative attitudes towards Jews in Germany for centuries" — a fact the piece juxtaposes against Felix Mendelssohn, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, writing a symphony to commemorate 300 years of the Reformation built on Ein Feste Burg.
Why it matters: By putting scripture into singable everyday German and printing it, Luther turned music into the Reformation's first mass medium — a template that carried from Bach's cantatas to Brecht and Weill's political operas to Julius Eastman's downtown minimalism. The article also foregrounds a legacy Luther's chorale-centered reputation often overshadows: his antisemitic writings shaped anti-Jewish prejudice in Germany for centuries.
Ask SkimNews
