"What Is the World to Me"

Near the end of September, I watched the Concordia University Wisconsin chapel service from the 23rd.  The hymn was "What Is the World to Me," and I noticed a small feature at the beginning of the first verse.

The hymn starts with the lines "What is the world to me / With all its vaunted pleasure," sung to these phrases from the tune "Was frag' ich nach der Welt":

"Pleasure" is sung with a melisma (E D C), lending a sense of the entirety or breadth of "all."  That the word is sung to all different pitches may contribute to this, too.

"Was frag' ich nach der Welt" (TLH #272)

"O God, My Faithful God"

I noticed a couple small features specific to Lutheran Worship's version of "O God, My Faithful God."  In Lutheran Worship, the hymn is sung to the tune "Was frag' ich nach der Welt," but in The Lutheran Service Book, it's sung to the tune "O Gott, du frommer Gott."

Here are the first two phrases of "Was frag' ich nach der Welt":

The first two lines are "O God, my faithful God, / True fountain ever flowing."  "Flowing" is sung with a melisma (F# E D), musically giving a sense either of movement or of the duration of "ever."

The second two phrases:

In the third verse, the text here is "Guard me lest idle speech / May from my lips be falling."  "Falling" is sung to a descending group of notes (C# B A), musically giving a sense of its meaning.  That it's sung with a melisma emphasizes this.

"What Is the World to Me"

About a year ago, "What Is the World to Me" was one of the hymns in church, and I noticed a small feature in the third verse.  The fifth line is "I have a higher good," sung to this phrase from the tune "Was frag' ich nach der Welt":

The first syllable of "higher" is sung to the highest note in this phrase (C), giving something of a sense of its meaning.

"Was frag' ich nach der Welt" (TLH #99)

This tune is used for a number of hymns (and I think it's also in some Bach cantatas), but I never realized that it's "Was frag' ich" (LSB leaves out the apostrophe).