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Of the Father's Heart Begotten alternatively known as Of the Father's Love Begotten is a Christmas carol based on the Latin poem Corde natus by the Roman poet Aurelius Prudentius, from his Liber Cathemerinon (hymn no. IX) beginning "Da puer plectrum," which includes the Latin stanzas listed below.
Contents
The ancient poem was translated and paired with a medieval plainchant melody Divinum mysterium. Divinum mysterium was a "Sanctus trope" - an ancient plainchant melody which over the years had been musically embellished. An early version of this chant appears in manuscript form as early as the 10th century, although without the melodic additions, and "trope" versions with various melodic differences appear in Italian, German, Gallacian, Bohemian and Spanish manuscripts dating from the 13th to 16th centuries.
Divinum mysterium first appears in print in 1582 in the Finnish song book Piae Cantiones, a collection of seventy-four sacred and secular church and school songs of medieval Europe compiled by Jaakko Suomalainen and published by Theodoric Petri. In this collection, Divinum mysterium was classified as "De Eucharistia" reflecting its original use for the Mass.
The text of the Divinum mysterium was substituted for Prudentius's poem when it was published by Thomas Helmore in 1851. In making this fusion, the original meter of the chant was disturbed, changing the original triple meter rhythm into a duple meter and therefore altering stresses and note lengths. A later version by Charles Winfred Douglas corrected this using an "equalist" method of transcription, although the hymn is now found in both versions as well as a more dance-like interpretation of the original melody.
Translations
There are two translations commonly sung today; one by John Mason Neale and Henry W. Baker and another by Roby Furley Davis.
Neale's original translation began "Of the Father sole begotten," in his Hymnal Noted (London, 1851), and contained only six stanzas. It was Neale's music editor, Thomas Helmore, who paired this hymn with the Latin plainsong. Neale's translation was later edited and extended by Henry W. Baker for Hymns Ancient and Modern (London, 1861; below).
Dissatisfied with Neale's translation, Roby Furley Davis (1866–1937), a scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge, wrote a new version for the English Hymnal of 1906. Davis was assistant master at Weymouth College and a scholar of the works of Tacitus, especially his book on Agricola. This version was also used in the popular Carols for Choirs series by David Willcocks.
In other media
In Paul Caldwell and Sean Ivory's SATB choral piece "Hope for Resolution", the classic hymn is overlapped with a traditional Zulu melody.