Hail to the Lord’s anointed 

James Montgomery (1771-1854), born in Ayrshire, Scotland, to Moravian missionary parents, was sent at age six to a Moravian seminary near Leeds; his parents died in the West Indies while he was in this school.  Montgomery began writing verse as a child, modelling his religious verse on Moravian hymns, but managing to find and read much secular verse.  He left the school at age 16, eventually making his way to London in the hope of having his work published. Unsuccessful in that attempt, in 1792 he became an assistant to Joseph Gales, the editor of a liberal newspaper in Sheffield and when Gales fled England to avoid political prosecution Montgomery took over the newspaper, renaming it, and moderating but continuing its liberal policies.  He edited the Sheffield Iris for thirty-two years, writing poetry while he kept his newspaper going.  (A small book of poems, Prison Amusements, grew out of time served in 1795 and 1796 for “sedition”—he had printed a song celebrating the fall of the Bastille and had published an account of a riot which criticized a military officer.)  Montgomery wrote eleven volumes of poems which were generally well received.  Both Southey and Shelley were his friends.  He also wrote humanitarian prose, particularly against slavery and decrying the plight of chimney sweeps.  But it is as a hymn writer that Montgomery did his best work. He continued to write hymns alongside his secular poems, writing more than 400 in all, including “Angels from the realms of glory.”  “Hail to the Lord’s anointed,” written in 1821 for a Moravian Christmas celebration and published in Montgomery’s Songs of Zion in 1822, was originally a poem of 8 eight-line stanzas (7.6.7.6 D) paraphrasing psalm 72.  Most hymnals now omit three or four stanzas.  

 

Several tunes have been paired with Montgomery’s words, including “Ellaconbe” and “St Theodulph.”   We sing the tune  “Crüger,” named for its composer, Johann Crüger (1598-1662).  An ethnic Sorb born in a small Brandenburg village on the Polish border, Crüger first studied at the Latin School in a nearby town; he later studied music in Regensburg with a pupil of Gabrieli, and then theology in Berlin and Wittenberg.  In 1622, while teaching at the Evangelical Theological Gymnasium in Berlin, he was appointed Cantor of the Church of St Nicholas, a position he held for the rest of his life.   Crüger published several works on music theory, but he is best-known for editing Praxis Pietatis Melica, the most important Protestant hymn book of the 17th century.  Its subtitle explains the Latin title: “That is: practice of Godliness in Christian and comforting chants.”  Crüger edited this collection from 1647 until his death.  This tune first appeared in his earlier collection,  Newes vollkömliches Gesangbuch (1640).  The harmonization by W. H. Monk was composed for A&M in 1861.  Among many others, Crüger composed the hymn tunes for “O sacred head, now wounded,” “Now thank we all our God,” and “Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness.”