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 urge