MINE EYES SHALL BEHOLD HIM ORATORIO - using texts of Fanny Crosby in new Classical settings with Verses of John's Gospel 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. 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. This is a recording of the premiere performance of this work from October 2016 in Farragut Tennessee. It is our hope it will encourage us to believe also that our eyes may one day behold our Savior Jesus. Cormac O’Duffy. Composer “Mine Eyes Shall behold Him Nov 2016