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Tune Pairings with "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling"
One of Charles Wesley's greatest hymns, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling", was written as a sacred parody of a song, "Fairest Isle, All Isles Excelling", with lyrics by John Dryden and tune by Henry Purcell, in Purcell's secular opera King Arthur. Charles Wesley not only parodied the lyrics in his hymn on God's Love, but he set the hymn to an arrangement of Purcell's tune in the Wesleys' 1761(?) Sacred Melody, the earliest known publication of the hymn with music. The pairing did not set any records for popularity. The tune, called WESTMINSTER, accounts for only four of the more than 800 instances of Love Divine tune pairings in the Hymnary.org database.
In the Hymnary database, BEECHER, composed in 1870 by John Zundel and named for his pastor, is by a considerable margin the most frequently paired tune with this hymn. It was first published in Zundel's Christian Heart Songs (1870), but the earliest page scan in the database is this one, from the 1880 Sacred Songs and Solos:
Between 1762 and 1870, I'm not sure what tunes were most frequently used to sing Love Divine. Its meter, 8.7.8.7.D (which can also be reduced to 8.7.8.7, doubling the number of stanzas), is fairly common, so there's no shortage of possible pairings. But once BEECHER appeared, at least in the United States it rapidly became the overwhelming favorite, and although it has lost some ground in the last few decades, it remains the leader on this side of "the Pond". In England John Stainer's LOVE DIVINE (Stainer) gained a fairly strong foothold in the Church of England's hymnals, and it too has maintained that standing into the present day, but it never got much traction in the United States; the most recent American hymnal I know of that used it was the 1921 Presbyterian book. Been awhile.
As an American Baptist, I was naturally raised singing this hymn fairly frequently, and always and only to BEECHER. But while I love the words, with or without the part about removing our ability and/or inclination to sin in the second verse (to which the Psalter Hymnal Handbook attributes the frequent omission of a verse in hymnals beginning already in the 18th century), BEECHER has never been my favorite tune, and especially not in this case. I think this is basically just a personal-preference sort of thing; BEECHER seems a bit march-like for a love hymn, or something. I like HYFRYDOL in a general way better than I do BEECHER, and HYFRYDOL seems better suited to the topic than BEECHER in my estimation, so when I found that some churches sang "Love Divine" to HYFRYDOL, I was pleased. But I soon found that some churches, or some hymnal editors, like HYFRYDOL way too much, and have an inclination to pair any and all new and old 8.7.8.7.D hymns with it. I didn't like that. So when I met up with the BLAENWERN pairing, very likely in connection with a British royal wedding, I became a fan of it; I know that the fact that (very unusually, here in the US) gave the Love Divine BLAENWERN pairing was a factor in making me a fan both of the nondenominational Christian Life Hymnal of 2006 and of the Community of Christ (RLDS) Community of Christ Sings of 2012. I've also enjoyed singing this hymn to the tune LOVE DIVINE (Waller), to which it has been set in various editions of The Sacred Harp beginning in 1869, that is one year before Zundel published BEECHER. To the best of my knowledge, no one has arranged the Waller tune in roundnote hymnal format; I'd be interested to see how that would work.
Again because I am an American (or Usonian, as I often prefer to say it, following Frank Lloyd Wright, so as to avoid the implication that Argentina is somehow involved) I haven't had the experience of attending a service where this hymn was sung to LOVE DIVINE (Stainer), which is strongly preferred by many in the Church of England and in the Anglican churches of many other countries; I've gone to lots of Episcopal services, but their Hymnal 1982 uses HYFRYDOL. So my personal experience is limited to singing this hymn to BEECHER, HYFRYDOL, BLAENWERN, and LOVE DIVINE (Waller). But among the 1863 instances of "Love Divine" in the hymnals indexed at Hymnary.org, there are hymnals where it has been paired with 85 different tunes. This page will present a large number of these. I'm interested in knowing what readers' preferences are, and whether anybody finds a pairing here that they actually like better than any of the currently frequent ones (i.e. BEECHER, HYFRYDOL, BLAENWERN, and LOVE DIVINE (Stainer). I'm also interested in any information on the pairings that predominated after 1760, when the Wesleys published it with WESTMINSTER (Purcell) [= FAIREST ISLE], but before 1870, when those four tunes began to appear. The Hymnary "Love Divine" text authority page has very little to say on this subject. I think only one of the page scans with music there predates 1870, namely the tune published in the 1819 Musica Sacra edited by Thomas Hastings. I have no idea whether that tune was sung in churches.
Historically in the database the third most frequent pairing is with a tune composed by George F. LeJeune in 1887. Although it was fairly popular in the early 20th century, at least in the United States, the most recent instance of this pairing appeared in 1961 (in the Trinity Hymnal, whose more recent editions have gone with BEECHER); the tune has been used occasionally since then with other texts (particularly "Jesus, Thou Divine Companion"), but not frequently.
| So here are page scans of the four pairings other than BEECHER that have enjoyed some popularity: | |
|---|---|
HYFRYDOL |
BLAENWERN |
LOVE DIVINE (Stainer) |
...and LOVE DIVINE (Le Jeune)  |
