Hark! The Herald Angels Sing: A Song History
The words began as Charles Wesley’s “Hymn for Christmas-Day,” printed in 1739 in Hymns and Sacred Poems, the collection he issued with his brother John.[1] Wesley’s first couplet called on the “welkin,” an old word for the sky, to ring with glory.[2] The opening everyone sings today is not his: George Whitefield rewrote it, along with other lines, for his 1753 Collection of Hymns for Social Worship.[2][3] Other editors kept tinkering for decades, Martin Madan among them in 1760, and by 1782 the new first couplet was being repeated as a refrain.[2][4]
Jan Muller, Holy Family and Two Music-Making Angels, engraving, ca. 1588–92. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The music came from a very different occasion. In 1840 Felix Mendelssohn wrote a Festgesang for the Leipzig festivities marking four centuries of Gutenberg’s printing press.[3][4] Writing to his English publisher in 1843, Mendelssohn suggested the second number deserved new words but warned that “it will never do to sacred words.”[2] In the mid-1850s William Hayman Cummings, working with his congregation at Waltham Abbey, fitted Mendelssohn’s melody to the Wesley–Whitefield text.[2][3] Sources differ slightly on the date, but the Hymnology Archive reports that J. J. Ewer & Co. issued it as sheet music in 1856.[2][4] Its inclusion in Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861 made the pairing standard.[2][4] For bringing the pieces together, a Library of Congress music blog calls Cummings “the hero of this tale.”[3]
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