When
I wrote about the Biblical sources for "When to Our World the Savior Came," I also found a small musical thing to note. The hymn is sung to the tune "Canonbury" (an adaptation of the fourth of Robert Schumann's Nachtstücke, Op. 23). Here's the last phrase:
In the fourth verse, the text here is "His healing hands stretched forth to save." "Stretched" is sung with a melisma (B A), and this musical elongation gives a sense of the word's meaning.
