Cyriacus Schneegaß

Cyriacus Schneegaß was born in 1546 near Gotha in Thuringia and studied at the University of Jena after attending school in Gotha. From 1573 he served as an evangelical pastor at St. Blasius in Friedrichroda and also held responsibilities connected with the Weimar superintendency. He worked not only as a pastor and theologian but also as a hymn writer, composer, and writer on music. His publications included sacred songs, psalm paraphrases, and collections for Christmas and the New Year.

Modern German hymnals, including the Evangelisches Gesangbuch, commonly credit Schneegaß with the text of In dir ist Freude. That attribution is not entirely free from historical difficulty. Older English hymnological references associated the hymn with Johann Lindemann, the Gotha cantor whose 1590s Erfurt collections transmitted the sacred contrafactum, while those same references admitted that Lindemann's authorship of the words in his collections was uncertain. The safest description is therefore that Schneegaß is the modern received attribution, while the precise authorship remains disputed in the documentary record.

Schneegaß died in Friedrichroda in 1597. His broader hymn-writing work places him firmly within the Lutheran culture of congregational song in late-sixteenth-century Thuringia.