Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

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Hark! the Herald Angels Sing

"Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" is a Christmas hymn or carol written by Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley. It first appeared in Hymns and Sacred Poems in 1739. The original opening couplet was "Hark! how all the welkin rings / Glory to the King of Kings". The version known today is the result of alterations by various hands, most notably George Whitfield, Wesley's co-worker, who changed the opening couplet to the familiar one we know today. One of the original tunes that "Hark! How all the welkin rings" was sung to was also used as a tune for "Amazing Grace". Many hymns in the eighteenth century consisted merely of printed words without music. It was left to those leading the singing to choose an appropriate tune based on the metre of the verse. Wesley himself, however, envisaged his lyrics sung to the same tune as his Easter hymn, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today."

The tune that is now almost always used for this carol is based on a chorus composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1840, part of his cantata Festgesang an die Künstler ("Festival Song") to commemorate the printer Johann Gutenberg and the invention of his printing press. The cantata was first presented at the great festival held at Leipzig. Festgesang's second chorus, "Vaterland, in deinem Gauen", was adapted in 1855 by William Hayman Cummings. Mendelssohn said of the song that it could be used with many different choruses but that it should not be used for sacred music. This may be because the melodic and harmonic structure of the tune are similar to the Gavotte of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 4; indeed Mendelssohn (who has always been linked with the music of Bach) may simply have adapted Bach's music for his chorus, as was proposed by Nigel Poole with his (transposed) arrangement of the Gavotte as Bach's Christmas Carol^[1].

[edit] Performance

In the UK at least Hark! The Herald Angels Sing has popularly been performed in an arrangement that maintains the basic original William Hayman Cummings harmonisation of the Mendelssohn tune for the first two verses but adds a soprano descant in verse 3 by Sir David Willcocks. This arrangement was first published in 1961 by Oxford University Press in the first book of the Carols for Choirs series.

There are two notable examples in which Hark! The Herald Angels Sing has served as an ending to Christmas musical programmes. For many years it has served as the recessional hymn of the annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in King's College Chapel, Cambridge.^[2] It has also been sung at the end of the animated Christmas special, A Charlie Brown Christmas by the entire Peanuts gang, and all three verses were included at the end of the book version, albeit with one alteration; the lyrics "Offspring of a Virgin's womb" were replaced with "Finding here his humble home".