1 Hymnal verse - 2 unison over ad lib - 3 descant (demo SA 8 bars, SATB 7 bars tune: tenor)

One would think that such a comfortable, natural pairing of hymn and tune would have an equally lovely backstory. But instead, one hardly knows where to begin with the mess of musical and editorial entrails from which it emerges - an editorially overworked and reduced hymn married to a tune with a tenuous naming convention. In Glory to God: a Companion Carl Daw wrote "This hymn provides a classic example of the persistence of erroneous information." Due due to misattribution of the tune to Liszt, who quoted it in his oratorio, The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, the name ST ELIZABETH was assigned to rescue it from an offensive name derived from the oratorio (which, though still in use, we won't bother to repeat). In truth, the tune has nothing to do with Liszt or the historical St. Elizabeth of Thuringia. It is instead traditionally considered to be - with no evidence - a folk tune from Silesia, an eastern European area now encompassed primarily by Poland, published in 1842. The tune is very similar to a 1766 Dutch setting to the hymn “Laat ons juichen Batavieren", clearly its antecedent.

Fairest Lord Jesus is from a Jesuit hymn, its first known German appearance as Schönster Herr Jesu being a 1662 copy or transcription. It was published fifteen years later in the Roman Catholic Münsterisch Gesangbuch (1677), set to the tune now known eponymously as SCHÖNSTER HERR JESU. It was originally six verses, beginning with Jesus shining fairer than Creation, then the Sun and Moon, the Forests and Woodlands, Heaven, Earth, and concluding with an invocation of the sacrament of communion. This hymn has had several German variations and translations, though the English versions have filtered the text through the Romantic lens of 19th C. naturalism, settling on a three verse configuration celebrating the God of creation. The hymn was subsequently vandalized by the addition of a fourth verse borrowed from a altered version of the hymn - published in the League-of-Nations era that followed WWI - which injects 'nations' into the versification, somehow equating God's enduring sacred work of nature with the profane human artifice of 'nations.' The merger is poetically and theologically incongruent, and many hymnals leave it out of Fairest Lord Jesus.