33. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

The Story Behind the Hymn

Charles Wesley's original text for this hymn, first published in his 1739 collection 'Hymns and Sacred Poems,' opened quite differently from the familiar modern version sung today — his actual first line read 'Hark, how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of kings,' making deliberate use of the archaic English word 'welkin,' meaning the vault or dome of the visible sky, a word already sounding old-fashioned even to many of Wesley's own contemporaries.

Roughly a decade later, fellow evangelist and sometime Wesley collaborator George Whitefield altered that opening line to the now-universally familiar 'Hark! the herald angels sing' when he included the hymn in his own 1753 hymn collection, a change Charles Wesley himself is reported to have strongly disliked, viewing it as an unwelcome and unauthorized alteration of his original text — yet it was Whitefield's revised opening, not Wesley's original wording, that ultimately endured and became permanently fixed in nearly every hymnal published since.

The tune now considered practically inseparable from the hymn was not written for it at all, and was not even originally intended for any sacred purpose whatsoever. It was composed by the German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1840 as part of a large secular cantata written to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the printing press and its inventor, Johannes Gutenberg — a purely civic, non-religious commemorative work with no connection to Christmas or Christian hymnody at the time of its composition. Mendelssohn himself reportedly stated afterward, in his own correspondence, that he specifically did not believe the melody was well suited to sacred religious words, predicting it would never successfully carry a hymn text.

An English organist and musician named William H. Cummings nonetheless adapted the melody to fit Wesley's hymn text fifteen years later, in 1855, directly against the composer's own stated prediction, and the resulting pairing proved so immediately and lastingly successful that few congregations singing it today have any idea the now-inseparable tune was originally composed to honor a printing press anniversary rather than the birth of Christ, or that its own composer confidently expected it to fail as a hymn tune.