OT Advent Calendar Day 18: Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
Advent has always been my favorite time of year. Not only does it lead up to the festival of Christmas, but my birthday falls right around half way through. What’s more, I grew up in snowy Central New York—that’s the barren hinterlands of Upstate, for those in the city so nice they named it twice—and if I didn’t get a White Christmas, the Great Lakes were good for a storm around my birthday so there’d at least be a good beginning to the winter.
Advent is far from an untouched subject around these parts, so I’m clearly not alone.
Your OT Advent Calendar this year will be musical. We’ll talk about diamond-in-the-rough traditional tunes just waiting for renewed popularity, crimes against Christmas, the silly songs and the songs that have become modern traditions. We’ll also talk about the notion of true Christmas Carols, those which address the twelve days festival beginning on Christmas itself, including not just the one day-counting song but another.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Today’s tune is “Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming.”
This German song entitled “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”—literally, “It Is a Rose Sprung Up”—is one of the most Marian of Christmas Carols. The text, one of a great many treating of Isaiah’s prophecy, is from the 15th century where it was preserved at the Carthusian Monastery of St. Albans in Trier.
The English translation I am familiar with is that of Theodore Baker and written in 1894. While Baker did not translate all of the verses, his version is tight and efficient. Other translators picked and chose among verses as well, another even added one.
Lo, how a rose e’er blooming,
From tender stem hath sprung.
Of Jesse’s lineage coming,
As men of old have sung;
It came, a flow’ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
Isaiah ’twas foretold it,
The Rose I have in mind,
With Mary we behold it,
The virgin mother kind;
To show God’s love aright,
She bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.
O Flower, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispel with glorious splendor
The darkness everywhere;
True man, yet very God,
From Sin and death now save us,
And share our every load.
The music is very old as well. The tune first appeared in the Speyer Hymnal of 1599 with a harmonization by one Michael Praetorius appearing seven years later.
While the algorithm that will likely one day decide if we live or die is at least — for now on the surface — benevolent, it has suggested that you watch this Flash Mob perform the Halleluiah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah in a German mall food court:
