Not familiar with this one at all, I'm guessing it might have been in the category of "weird German dances without obvious meter, repurposed to 1600s/1700s hymns," but maybe it first showed up with this song? The composer's name is Johann D. Herrnschmidt, which is pretty neat, lots of consonants, and translation by committee.

I'm not sure how to parse the sentence "All that has being, to praise God solely, with happy heart its amen sings!" I get that "solely" is a forced rhyme with "holy," but whose heart is happy? "All"? Should it be a plural or something?

The image of a grave that "engulfs its prey" is pretty intense. And the line about how "earthborn" rulers won't help against death isn't a new idea, it's from Psalms, but I think it can be interpreted differently in new contexts that have to do with ideologies, not just individual leaders. But if your worldview has rituals and metaphysics and sin and flagellation, but no forgiveness or resurrection...does it really stack up?

The second and third verses are by Martin Luther--translation by committee. I'm not sure I've mentioned this (I think I have, who knows), but once I saw a more "accurate" set of translations, basically making the point that Luther's German hymns were actually pretty bad as poetry, in terms of rhyme/meter/scansion. He was mostly trying to get his message across in a memorable, vernacular way, not make high art. So most of the familiar translations we know probably make Luther sound like a better lyricist than he actually was!

That said, I'm not really sure what's going on in verse 3. We pray that we may live together, "nor repent this blest communion." Okay, so there isn't a "neither," but "nor" probably means something like "and also, that we may not"...disown/wish we hadn't had communion? Keep us in the faith? "Repent" feels like a weird word to use there, you want to repent (of) your sins, not the good things.

This is also one of those where it's written with no sharps or flats in the key signature (C major/A minor) and ends on the fifth note of the scale (G mixolydian?) but there are so many F-sharps that you could arguably just as well have put it in G major with occasional F-naturals.

The lyricist's name is "Muus," which I think is pretty awesome. Double U's! Is it pronounced like "Moose"? If he were a baseball player, would people say they were yelling Muuuuuus instead of booing him?

Translation is by committee, so I'm not sure if the rhymes are as repetitive in Dutch. But the rhyme scheme is ABABA; the B's are feminine rhymes that turn out to be masculine-in-disguise, the A's are masculine. And they repeat between verses: we get stuff like "dead/head/bread," "bread/fed/dead," "dead/bread/dead." At this point it's so repetitive that it loops all the way around back to charming! That's why it's in the "awesome" category.

Meanwhile, on hymns in the wild, we had this hymn for Good Friday that's addressed in part not to Jesus or to our neighbors, but to the cross itself, as if praying for it to treat Jesus' body respectfully. On the one hand, this is bizarre timing-wise. (I have an uncle who has opinions about whether you can cheer for a sports game you're watching on tape delay, versus watching live on TV where your cheers won't be heard either way--but that's for hours, not millennia!) On the other, the miracle of Easter transcends space and time; not only does Christ's sacrifice change the entire universe, but maybe we can envision the cross itself as reaching beyond that physical moment so that we can address it "contemporaneously."

This is a weird case of translation by committee--488 was originally in German but translated into English (the German lyrics aren't printed here). This is a very loose translation into Spanish, that skips verse 2 of 488. Now, it's possible that this Spanish is pretty close to the original German and the English is not, but the Spanish and the English aren't too literal versions of each other, other than they're both about the miracle of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Jesus.

This arrangement also introduces a chorus (with bass echoes!), which is in E major, while the verses are in...I'm not sure what, it has no sharps or flats and ends on the third note (E) of the scale, with a bunch of G-sharps thrown in for fun. But anyway. A lot going on here, at least tags-wise!

Well, in the title, both Light and Radiance are capitalized, but in the text, Radiance is but light isn't. I guess it still counts as proper nouns. :p

Lots of large tenor/bass gaps.

Translation by committee gives us "grace/maze" (and also "praise/grace" in a different verse!) Most of the emphasis is on, and I'm paraphrasing, asking God's light to be revealed to people who are sinful and/or doubting. But there's an interesting pivot in verse three to "take away the needless fears of those who tremble to express the faith their inmost hearts confess." I'm wondering whether in Heermann's day that was more a threat of religious warfare (you don't want to be too obviously Protestant in a Catholic principality, or vice-versa?) Versus today when it can, somewhat anachronistically, be read as "help people to express their faith who are just ashamed of it."

Translation by committee--this was put together for the "blue book" supplemental hymnal released in 1995, a version of the Magnificat (Mary's song of praise when she found out she was pregnant with Jesus). Interesting shift from "every land" shall praise God in the beginning, to the end being about God fulfilling specifically the promises made to the Israelites.

Arrangement is by the prolific Ralph Vaughan Williams, and features some very large tenor/bass jumps, including a couple places where they're an octave plus a fifth apart. That's a lot. (Again, in some of these places it's possible a smaller person could play it on piano by grouping the tenors in with the right hand, but still tricky.)

The hymn tune is the original German title, "Christ lag in Todesbanden."

The allusion in verse 3 is to the Passover narrative; not only is the Passover festival the context for the Easter events, but Christians also draw parallels between the Passover lamb and Jesus as the Lamb of God. The hyphenated offset of "so strong God's love!" is also a weird touch, this may be an example of translation by committee silliness. The image of "death's gray shell" is also a weird one; was that shoehorned in to get the rhyme with "hell"? Death is like a scorpion whose sting is gone and it just has an exoskeleton floating around? Mario Kart allusion 500 years early? Someone help me with this.