One never knows . . . .

One never knows what our choir members are thinking . . . unless they blog about it.

Look what I found here:

Mendelssohn originally wrote the piece in English but then later translated it back into his native German, and the German version became the standard while the English got lost to history.

Apparently some music historian dug up the original English lyrics and republished it. There have been other translations before, but our concert will feature the world debut of THESE PARTICULAR English lyrics, or something like that. Musicians get excited about the weirdest things.

Anyway, my point in writing this is that I don't particularly like it. The music doesn't really do it for me, but singing the English words just makes it generally much more unpleasant. The story is the most tedious kind of apologetics. It is all about how Saint Paul used to persecute Christians, then was blinded and visited by Jesus. He converted to Christianity and then went on to write most of the most awful sexually repressed parts of the Bible.

Full blog post.