"Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott" (TLH #224)

"Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord"

Last summer, I noticed a small feature in "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord."  The fourth line of the third verse is "Let trials turn us not aside," sung to this musical phrase (the tune is "Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott"):

"Turn" is sung with a melisma (A C), so while it's negated, there's a sense of literal movement or metaphorical diverging.

"Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord"

I wrote about "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord" a couple years ago, but during the Pentecost service this year, I found something else to note.

In the first verse, there are the lines "In holy faith Your Church unite; / From ev'ry land and ev'ry tongue."  The second of these two lines is sung to this phrase (from the tune "Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott"):

"Land" and the second "ev'ry" are both sung with melismas (A Bb and G F E respectively), which gives a musical sense of the multitude of "ev'ry land and ev'ry tongue."

"Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord"

A couple months ago, I transcribed "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord" (coincidentally, it was the day after I'd sung it in church on Pentecost Sunday).  While transcribing it, I noticed a small connection between the text and the tune.

The first three lines are "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord, / With all Your graces now outpoured / On each believer's mind and heart."  The tune to which the hymn is sung is "Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott," and the second musical phrase of that tune descends at the end:

To some degree, the "outpour[ing]" in the text is represented by the descending phrase to which it's sung.

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For what it's worth:  "Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott" is essentially "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord" in German.  It's actually "Come, Holy Ghost, Lord God," so it seems that the English just shuffles this a bit and inserts "and" in order to get an extra syllable for that first phrase.