Castleford Team Parish Magazine July & August 2014 2014-07 | Page 20

July & August 2014

HYMN: THE STORY BEHIND ‘GLORIOUS
THINGS OF THEE ARE SPOKEN’
Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God;
He whose word cannot be broken
Formed thee for his own abode.
On the rock of ages founded,
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded,
Thou may’st smile at all thy foes.
See, the streams of living waters,
Springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters,
And all fear of want remove.
Who can faint while such a river
Ever flows their thirst to assuage:
Grace, which like the Lord the giver,
Never fails from age to age?...
The year was 1800, and Vienna was under bombardment by
Napoleon’s troops. The great Austrian composer, Haydn, then old
and frail, asked to be carried to his piano. There he made his own
defiance of Napoleon, by solemnly playing through his composition
‘Emperor’s Hymn’. Haydn had composed it for the Austrian
Emperor, Franz ll’s birthday on 12 February 1797. Haydn never
touched his piano again, and died a few days later, aged 77.

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