We plough the fields and scatter/The good seed

This is a paraphrase by Jane Montgomery Campbell (1817-1878) of part of a harvest song by the German writer Matthias Claudius (1740-1815).  The son of a Lutheran pastor, Claudius briefly studied theology at the University of Jena.  He later edited a newspaper in Wandsbeck, near Hamburg, printing many of his own poems and stories.  (Claudius wrote the poem Der Tod und das Mädchen, which inspired Schubert’s lied and the string quartet.)  In 1782 he printed a story about a harvest celebration, Paul Erdmanns Fest, with a Bauernlied (Peasant’s song) of 16 quatrains sung by field workers giving thanks for the harvest.  It begins with an echo of Genesis: Im Anfang war’s auf Erden (“In the beginning, there was on earth”) sung by a single voice; a chorus responds with Alle gute Gabe/kam oben her von Gott/Vom schönen blauen himmel herab (“All good gifts/come here from God/From the beautiful blue sky”).  The remainder of the song follows that antiphonal pattern.  Claudius composed a tune for the song in the story.   By the end of the century some parts of the poem had appeared in a hymn book.  In 1800 it was included in Melodien für Volksschulen (Melodies for Elementary Schools) with a tune composed by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz which we still use.

 

Schulz (1747-1800) was educated in the Michaelisschule School in Lüneberg (as Bach had been), and then in the famous humanistic school, the LünebergerJohanneum (where Telemann was a teacher), before studying privately in Berlin.   A highly successful performer, composer and conductor, he taught music in Berlin, where he also conducted the French Theatre, before becoming Kapellmeister first to the younger brother of Frederick the Great and then to the Royal Court in Copenhagen, where he also directed the Royal Danish Theatre.  As a composer he wrote quite a lot of music for both church and stage.  But he is known now primarily for his songs, including this tune, which was first published in a school songbook of folk tunes, Lieder im Volkston (1782), and then, in 1800, as noted above, with Claudius’ words.

 

Jane Montgomery Campbell was born in London [some say Bloomsbury, some Paddington]; her father, who held the living in absentia of a parish in Lincolnshire, was perpetual curate of St James’s, Paddington, until his death in 1859.  She may have taught singing in her father’s church school in London, but she published nothing until after his death, when she and her sister moved to the village of Bovey Tracey, on the edge of Dartmoor.  In 1861 the SPCK published Campbell’s A Handbook for Singers, a short booklet which may have been developed from lessons she taught in her father’s church school in London.  Soon after this some of her paraphrases of German hymns appeared in A Garland of Songs: or An English Liederkranz (1861), and then in Children’s Choral Book (1869), both edited by Charles S. Bere, Rector in the village of Uplowman in Devon, about 35 miles from Bovey Tracey.  “We plough the fields” was in the 1861 volume.  Campbell not only contributed poems to Bere’s book, but apparently cooperated  in the project, for in the Preface he says, “With the help of. . . a lady to whom whatever merit there is in this collection is due, but who wishes to remain nameless, I have ventured to compile this little book.”  

 

Campbell creates a cento, using  parts of six of Claudius’ sixteen quatrains (3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12) to make her three stanzas.  Of course, the antiphonal structure of the original is lost, but the eight-line stanzas preserve the quatrains.  In this form the hymn first appeared, with J. B. Dykes’s harmonization, in the 1868 Appendix to the first edition of A&M.  Among Campbell’s other work from German is her version of Stille nacht, heilige nacht, “Holy night!, Peaceful night!,” which Bere also published.  Jane Campbell died in a carriage accident on Dartmoor in 1878.

Join us as we conclude our Thanksgiving worship with this hymn on Sunday, October 13! Brad Barbeau and the Cathedral Choir will be joined by organist Alexander Straus-Fausto, a recent graduate of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale!