Unless stated otherwise, my source for hymn texts and tunes is The Lutheran Service Book.

Friday, June 17, 2022

"Jesus, Priceless Treasure"

A couple months ago, one of the hymns in church was "Jesus, Priceless Treasure," sung to the tune "Jesu, meine Freude."  Near the end of each verse, there are two shorter lines, sung to this phrase:


(According to the metrical classification, there's only one line here; but the text is formatted as two separate lines.)

In the sixth verse, the text here is "Yea, whate'er / I here must bear."  The sense is completed with the following lines:  "Thou art still my purest pleasure, / Jesus, priceless treasure!"  One of the syllables of "whate'er" is sung to an accidental (Ab), and because this pitch is outside of the tune's key (G minor), there's something of a sense of the breadth that "whate'er" entails.