Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring

Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,
Holy wisdom, love most bright;

Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.

Word of God, our flesh that fashioned,
With the fire of life impassioned,

Striving still to truth unknown,
Soaring, dying round Thy throne.

Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring
Words by Robert Bridges, 1899; music by Johann Sebastian Bach, 1723

Few melodies are as instantly familiar as this one. A gentle, rippling line keeps flowing over a slow and steady hymn tune. Its story stretches across more than three centuries and several countries, and it took a few happy turns along the way.

It begins in Germany. In 1642 a musician named Johann Schop wrote a hymn tune. In 1661 a poet named Martin Jahn wrote a German hymn called “Jesu, meiner Seelen Wonne.” Decades later, Johann Sebastian Bach drew on both.

Bach first wrote most of his cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (“Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life”) in 1716, as an Advent piece for the court chapel in Weimar. After he moved to Leipzig, he revised and expanded it. It was performed there on July 2, 1723, for the Feast of the Visitation. The beloved chorale was one of the new Leipzig additions. Bach actually used the music twice, to close each half of the cantata, once before the sermon and once after, with different German words each time. Neither German title means anything like “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.”

That phrase came later, from England. Robert Bridges was a poet who would one day become England’s poet laureate. He compiled a small hymnal for the church in the village of Yattendon, and it was published as a single volume in 1899. Bridges had a special fondness for German melodies and for Bach. His words for this tune are not a translation of what Bach set. They are a fresh English poem, inspired by the same hymn of Martin Jahn’s that Bach had drawn upon. So the title nearly everyone knows today is really Bridges’ own invention, and it stuck.

The piece found its widest audience through the British pianist Myra Hess. She published a solo piano arrangement in 1926, and a version for two pianos followed in 1934. During the Second World War, London’s concert halls went dark, and the National Gallery’s paintings were sent out of the city for safekeeping. Hess had the idea of filling the empty gallery with lunchtime concerts, and Londoners lined up to attend. Her performances of this piece came to stand for the city’s courage in those years, and for many older Britons it still carries that meaning.

As a classical chorale, it never had a place on the pop charts in its own right. Then, in 1972, a British studio group called Apollo 100 released an electrified instrumental version simply titled “Joy.” It climbed to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the Easy Listening chart. It was proof that a tune from 1723 could still find its way onto car radios two and a half centuries later.