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"Nearer, My God, to Thee" is a 19th-century Christian hymn by Sarah Flower Adams, based loosely on Genesis 28:11–19,[1] the story of Jacob's dream. Genesis 28:11–12 can be translated as follows: "So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it..."
The hymn is well known, among other uses, as the alleged last song the band on RMS Titanic played before the ship sank.
The lyrics to the hymn are as follows:[2][3][4]
A sixth verse was later added to the hymn by Edward Henry Bickersteth Jr. as follows:[2]
The verse was written by the English poet and Unitarian hymn writer Sarah Flower Adams (1805–48) at her home in Sunnybank, Loughton, Essex, England, in 1841. It was first set to music by Adams's sister, the composer Eliza Flower, for William Johnson Fox's collection Hymns and Anthems.[5]
In the United Kingdom, the hymn is usually associated with the 1861 hymn tune "Horbury" by John Bacchus Dykes, named for a village near Wakefield, England, where Dykes had found "peace and comfort".[6][7] In the rest of the world, the hymn is usually sung to the 1856 tune "Bethany" by Lowell Mason. British Methodists prefer the tune "Propior Deo" (Nearer to God), written by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) in 1872.[8] Sullivan wrote a second setting of the hymn to a tune referred to as "St. Edmund". Mason's tune has also penetrated the British repertoire.[9]
The Methodist Hymn Book of 1933 includes Horbury and two other tunes, "Nearer To Thee" (American) and "Nearer, My God, To Thee" (T C Gregory, 1901–?),[10] while its successor Hymns and Psalms of 1983 uses Horbury and "Wilmington" by Erik Routley.[11] Songs of Praise includes Horbury, "Rothwell" (Geoffrey Shaw) and "Liverpool" (John Roberts/Ieuan Gwyllt, 1822–1877).[12] Liverpool also features in the BBC Hymn Book of 1951[13] and the Baptist Hymn Book of 1962 (with Propior Deo).[14] The original English Hymnal includes the hymn set to Horbury,[15] while its replacement New English Hymnal drops the hymn. Hymns Ancient and Modern included Horbury and "Communion" (S S Wesley),[16] although later versions, including Common Praise, standardise on Horbury.[17]
Other 19th century settings include those by the Rev. N. S. Godfrey,[18] W. H. Longhurst,[19] Herbert Columbine,[20] Frederic N. Löhr,[21] Thomas Adams,[22] and one composed jointly by
Among other recordings, Doris Day included the song on her 1962 album You'll Never Walk Alone. Siobhan Owen, after singing it at a Titanic 100 year anniversary dinner, recorded it on her "Storybook Journey" album, released in June 2012.[48] A season 3 episode of Homicide: Life on the Street is entitled "Nearer My God to Thee".[49] The song is also played in episodes of the TV series Orphan Black.[50]
CNN's founder Ted Turner, at the launch of the channel in 1980, promised: "We won't be signing off until the world ends. ... We'll be ... covering it live. ... [And] when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer My God to Thee' before we sign off." Turner commissioned a video recording of the hymn for this purpose, played by a military marching band, which he sometimes played for reporters. In 2015, the video, tagged in CNN's database as "[Hold for release] till end of world confirmed", was leaked on the Internet.[47]
The Confederate army band played this song as the survivors of the disastrous Pickett's Charge (in the Battle of Gettysburg) returned from their failed infantry assault.[40] The Rough Riders sang the hymn at the burial of their slain comrades after the Battle of Las Guasimas.[41] A film called Nearer My God to Thee was made in 1917 in the UK. "Nearer, My God, to Thee" is sung at the end of the 1936 movie San Francisco.[42] In the Max Ophüls 1952 film, Le Plaisir, the French version of the hymn, 'Plus près de toi, mon Dieu,' is sung in a country church, which causes sobbing among a group of visiting Parisian courtesans."[43][44] The title of the hymn is also the title of a painting by physician Jack Kevorkian.[45] William F. Buckley mentions in the introduction to his 1998 book, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, that the title was inspired by "Nearer My God to Thee".[46]
Another tale, surrounding the death of President William McKinley in September 1901, quotes his dying words as being the first few lines of the hymn. At 3:30 pm, in the afternoon of September 14, 1901, after five minutes of silence across the nation, numerous bands across the United States played the hymn, McKinley's favorite, in his memory.[37] It was also played by the Marine Band on Pennsylvania Avenue during the funeral procession through Washington and at the end of the funeral service itself,[37] and at a memorial service for him in Westminster Abbey, London.[38] The hymn was also played as the body of assassinated American President James Garfield was interred at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the funerals of former U.S. Presidents Warren G. Harding[39] and Gerald R. Ford, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands
The hymn even made its way briefly onto the operatic stage. The singer Emma Abbott, prompted by "her uncompromising and grotesque puritanism" rewrote La traviata so that Violetta expired singing not Verdi's Addio del passato, but "Nearer My God to Thee".[36]
A dramatic paraphrase of the hymn tune was written for Joseph Bonnet wrote "In Memoriam – Titanic", the first of his Douze Pièces, Op. 10, based on the tune Horbury. It was published the year after the Titanic sank.[35]
"Nearer, My God, to Thee" was sung by the doomed crew and passengers of the SS Valencia as it sank off the Canadian coast in 1906, and this event may be the source of the Titanic legend.[31]
RMS Carpathia, who spoke with survivors, related: "The ship's band in any emergency is expected to play to calm the passengers. After the Titanic struck the iceberg the band began to play bright music, dance music, comic songs – anything that would prevent the passengers from becoming panic-stricken... various awe-stricken passengers began to think of the death that faced them and asked the bandmaster to play hymns. The one which appealed to all was 'Nearer My God to Thee'."[30]
"Nearer, My God, to Thee" is associated with the sinking of the RMS Titanic, as some survivors later reported that the ship's string ensemble played the hymn as the vessel sank. For example, Violet Jessop said in her 1934 account of the disaster that she had heard the hymn being played;[25] Archibald Gracie IV, however, emphatically denied it in his own account, written soon after the sinking, and Wireless Operator Harold Bride said that he had heard "Autumn",[26] by which he may have meant Archibald Joyce's then-popular waltz "Songe d'Automne" (Autumn Dream).[25] The "Bethany" version was used in the 1943 film Titanic and in the Jean Negulesco's 1953 film Titanic, whereas the "Horbury" version was played in Roy Ward Baker's 1958 movie about the sinking, A Night to Remember. The "Bethany" version was again used in James Cameron's 1997 Titanic.[8]
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The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, Mike Leigh, Operetta, Oscar Wilde
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