"Praise the Almighty, My Soul, Adore Him"

Last December, one of the tunes I recorded was "Lobe den Herren, o meine," used with "Praise the Almighty, My Soul, Adore Him" in The Lutheran Hymnal (#26).  I noticed a few connections between the tune and the text.

The first line of the third verse is "Blessed, yea, blessed is he forever," sung to this musical phrase:

The "forever" is sung with a melisma (C C B A), and since the syllables are stretched out, there's a musical sense of this long period of time.  Additionally, some of the syllables are sung to the notes with the longest values in this phrase (a half note and a dotted half note), which also gives a sense of this temporal span.

I also noticed that in the line "His rule is over rich and poor" in the fourth verse, "rule" really is above "rich and poor" as far as musical pitch.  "Rule" is sung to a B note (the highest note in the phrase), and "rich" and "poor" are sung to E and D notes, respectively:

"Lobe den Herren, o meine" (TLH #26)

I skipt #25 because it was in Eb major, which isn't one of the easier keys for mandolin, and because I couldn't get a good sense of the melody.  So here's the next tune.  I wasn't familiar with this one either, but it wasn't that difficult.