Until doing the research for this post, I didn’t know how Charles Wesley, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johann Gutenberg were related. It sounds like a bad joke: So a preacher, a composer, and a printer walk into a bar…
The carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” brings these and several others together, just as George Bailey’s friends from Bedford Falls all gather together to sing it at the end of the holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.
The carol first appeared in John and Charles Wesley’s 1739 collection, Hymns and Sacred Poems under the title, “Hymn for Christmas-Day” and was written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), John Wesley’s younger brother. John was the founder of the Methodist movement, and Charles was a leader and clergyman within the movement (although Charles did not wish to break with the Anglican church as John did). Over the course of his life, Charles wrote 6,000 hymns. Can we just take a minute to appreciate that? You’d have to write a hymn everyday for over sixteen years to pull that off. Some examples of eighteenth-century devotion make even the most regular practitioners of Christianity today look like weak sauce. Others of Charles Wesley’s hymns include “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending”; “Rejoice, the Lord Is King!”; “Jesus, Lover of my Soul”; “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus”; and “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”
In Charles Wesley’s 1739 version, besides the title being different, the first line–now the same as the title–wasn’t “Hark! The herald angels sing.” It was “Hark! how all the welkin rings.” I like the change just fine, but I love thinking about the original line too. “Welkin” is an Old English word (also found in Dutch and German) and can mean firmament, sky, cloud, and heavens. When we think of singing, we generally look for some living thing to be doing the singing, but centuries ago the skies and firmaments themselves were thought to produce and move according to heavenly music. Music–a special music inaudible to human ears–was the power that kept the elements of the cosmos in their spheres and contributed to harmonizing and ordering all of creation. In his 1687 hymn to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, John Dryden begins
This is the same tradition that C. S. Lewis refers to when, in his first book of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan sings Narnia into being. The belief that cosmic music ordered the universe had been replaced by the astronomical observations of Copernicus, Kepler, and others through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and particularly Newton’s laws of motion in the mid to late seventeenth century. Still, the idea of the universe humming and vibrating–ringing, to use Charles Wesley’s word–with powerful, heavenly music is an alluring one that hadn’t disappeared from cultural consciousness by the time Wesley wrote his hymn. I like to think that this is what he wished to evoke with “Hark! how all the welkin rings.” Plus, when I hear that line, rightly or wrongly, I think of it in a thick Scottish accent, and it makes me smile. But by 1753 or 1754, less than twenty years later, George Whitefield changed the line to “Hark! the herald angels sing” as we know it today in his Hymns for Social Worship.
Fix in Us thy humble Home,
Rise, the Woman’s Conqu’ring Seed,
Bruise in Us the Serpent’s Head.
Now display thy saving Pow’r,
Ruin’d Nature now restore,
Now in Mystic Union join
Thine to Ours, and Ours to Thine.
Stamp thy Image in its Place,
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy Love.
Let us Thee, tho’ lost, regain,
Thee, the Life, the Inner Man:
O! to All Thyself impart,
Form’d in each Believing Heart.
So when did we finally get to the tune we know for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” today? Over one hundred years after Wesley first published the hymn, the English musician and tenor William H. Cummings gave us the now-familiar musical setting. Where did he get it? Well, in Leipzig, Germany, the home of J. S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn, threw a wild party for the 400-year anniversary of movable type. Felix Mendelssohn composed a secular cantata honoring Johannes Gutenberg as part of the festivities, and it was performed in the market square (pictured here) on June 24, 1840.