about fanny crosby
Fanny J. Crosby, American Hymn writer
FANNY CROSBY (1820-1915)
What strikes me about the American hymn-writer Fanny Crosby, whose words supply part of the libretto for the ‘Mine Eyes Shall behold Him' Oratorio’ is that she is so like us. For many of us who have been raised in Christian churches and in the ‘Christian culture’ of the west, Christianity has been ‘normal’ for us as it was for her, a natural normal way to think about life, death and service to others. Unlike most of us, she had been stricken with blindness from her youth by a botched operation by a wandering physician. However, she subsequently developed a phenomenal memory and by her mid-teens she had memorized all the four gospels and many passages of the Old Testament. In spite of this she had no ‘assurance’ of the truth of her faith, and she felt ‘she was holding the world in one hand and her faith in the other’. In 1850, an outbreak of cholera in New York urged her to attend a revival meeting taking place at a church in Broadway. After two nights attending the mission, and upon hearing Isaac Watt’s famous hymn ‘Alas and did my Savior bleed’ she decided to give herself completely into the arms of her Savior and not to let Him ‘pass her by’ any more. She found herself ‘filled with celestial light’. From then on in her life, her gift of poetry was committed to writing hymns and she wrote more than 8,000 of them during her long life of service. Her final writing was on the day she died. After tending to a neighbor who has recently lost a child, encouraging her that her child Ruth was now ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’, she wrote what was her ‘swan song’ the verse ‘In the morn of Zion’s glory’. Later that day she passed to her heavenly reward where, as she always believed, her bind eyes would finally behold her Savior.
She said “Do you know that if at birth I had been able to make one petition, it would have been that I was born blind? Because when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior."
What strikes me about the American hymn-writer Fanny Crosby, whose words supply part of the libretto for the ‘Mine Eyes Shall behold Him' Oratorio’ is that she is so like us. For many of us who have been raised in Christian churches and in the ‘Christian culture’ of the west, Christianity has been ‘normal’ for us as it was for her, a natural normal way to think about life, death and service to others. Unlike most of us, she had been stricken with blindness from her youth by a botched operation by a wandering physician. However, she subsequently developed a phenomenal memory and by her mid-teens she had memorized all the four gospels and many passages of the Old Testament. In spite of this she had no ‘assurance’ of the truth of her faith, and she felt ‘she was holding the world in one hand and her faith in the other’. In 1850, an outbreak of cholera in New York urged her to attend a revival meeting taking place at a church in Broadway. After two nights attending the mission, and upon hearing Isaac Watt’s famous hymn ‘Alas and did my Savior bleed’ she decided to give herself completely into the arms of her Savior and not to let Him ‘pass her by’ any more. She found herself ‘filled with celestial light’. From then on in her life, her gift of poetry was committed to writing hymns and she wrote more than 8,000 of them during her long life of service. Her final writing was on the day she died. After tending to a neighbor who has recently lost a child, encouraging her that her child Ruth was now ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’, she wrote what was her ‘swan song’ the verse ‘In the morn of Zion’s glory’. Later that day she passed to her heavenly reward where, as she always believed, her bind eyes would finally behold her Savior.
She said “Do you know that if at birth I had been able to make one petition, it would have been that I was born blind? Because when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior."
ABOUT THE WRITING OF 'MINE EYES'
At the grave of Fanny J. Crosby
Bridgeport, Connecticut
I was thinking of trying to write an ‘American Passion’, the story of the death and resurrection of the Lord in a format very loosely based on the structure of Bach’s St Matthews’ Passion, with reflections drawn from American hymn-writers, when I thought of using John’s Gospel with reflections of Fanny’s in terms of Arias, and Recitatives with Choruses and Chorales. This is what ‘Mine Eyes’ is. You could say it is like Classical ‘Praise and Worship’, where it is a work to be listened to and not readily available to join in such as would be with modern praise choruses in churches today, but also unlike performances of Choral groups of Classical works where the emphasis tends to be on the skill of the performers and the execution and artistry of the work. I have tried to ‘marry’ the classical forms with modern sense of praise and worship music.
New York Institute for the Blind where Fanny was a pupil and teacher
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It was premiered in Knoxville by a Choir from Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic and Seven Day Adventist Churches under the direction of Gabe Loving on 22/23 October and was professionally recorded as a CD, the links of which are on this site.
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