Genevan Psalter

The Genevan Psalter is a collection of metrical psalms created under the supervision of John Calvin for liturgical use by the Reformed churches of the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century.

Before the Protestant Reformation a select group of performers generally sang the psalms during church services, not the entire congregation. John Calvin believed that the entire congregation should participate in praising God in the worship service and already in his famous work Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1536 he speaks of the importance of singing psalms. In the articles for the organization of the church and its worship in Geneva, dated January 16, 1537, Calvin writes: "it is a thing most expedient for the edification of the church to sing some psalms in the form of public prayers by which one prays to God or sings His praises so that the hearts of all may be roused and stimulated to make similar prayers and to render similar praises and thanks to God with a common love." For this reason he wanted to create a songbook of hymns based on the psalms in the belief that in this form these biblical text would become more easily accessible to people.

After being forced to leave Geneva in 1538, Calvin settled in Strasbourg, where he joined the Huguenot congregation and also led numerous worship services. It was in Strasbourg where he became familiar with the German versification of the psalms prepared by Martin Luther and others. Calvin shared these songs with his French congregation and also wrote some metrical versifications for them himself. Considering his own versions of the psalms not to be of sufficient quality, he turned to the French court poet Clément Marot, who had already versified most of the psalms in French during the first part of the sixteenth century.

In 1539 the first edition of Calvin's psalter was published. It bore the title "Aulcuns Pseaumes et cantiques mys en chant" and contained 18 psalms and hymns set to music, including 12 versifications of Marot (1, 2, 3, 15, 32, 51, 103, 114, 115, 130, 137, 143), six psalms of Calvin (25, 36, 46, 91, 113, 138), the ten commandments, the Song of Simeon and the Apostles' Creed. Most of the melodies therein were familiar tunes used in the German church in Strasbourg (Strasburg) at that time. Some were apparently composed by Wolfgang Dachstein or Matthias Greiter.

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