Kaspar Füger › Hymnals

Fuger, Caspar. Two Lutheran clergymen of this name, apparently father and son, seem to have lived in Dresden in the 16th century. The elder seems to have been for some time at Torgau, and then court preacher at Dresden to Duke Heinrich and his widow, and to have died at Dresden, 1592. Various works appeared under his name between 1564 and 1592. The younger was apparently born at Dresden, where he became third master and then conrector in the Kreuzschule. He was subsequently ordained diaconus, and died at Dresden, July 24, 1617 (Koch, ii. 215-216; Wetzel, i. 303; Wackernagel, as below, and i. pp. 459, 513, 569).

The hymn,
Wir Christenleut haben jetzund Freud [Christ¬mas], is quoted by Wackernagel, iv. p. 10, from Drey schöne Newe Geistliche Gesenge, 1592, and from the Dresden Gesang-Buch, 1593, in 5 stanzas of 6 lines. Wackernagel thinks it was written about 1552. Bode, p. 417, cites it as in Georg Pondo's Erne kurtze Comödien von der Geburt des Herren Christi extant in a manuscript copy, dated 1589, in the Royal Library at Berlin. It is probably by the elder Fuger, though Wetzel and others ascribe it to the younger. Included in many later hymn-books, and recently as No. 57 in the Unverfälschter Liedersegen, 1851. The only translation in common use is:-—
We Christians may rejoice to-day, a good and full translation by Miss Winkworth in her Chorale Book for England, 1863, No. 34. [Rev. James Mearns, M.A.]

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)