Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Should be titled Hark Harold the Angel sings
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is an English Christmas carol that first appeared in 1739 in the collection Hymns and Sacred Poems. The carol, based on Luke 2:14, tells of an angelic chorus singing praises to God. As it is known in the modern era, it features lyrical contributions from Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, two of the founding ministers of Methodism, with music adapted from “Vaterland, in deinen Gauen” by Felix Mendelssohn.Wesley, who had written the original version as “Hymn for Christmas-Day,” had requested and received slow and solemn music for his lyrics, which has since largely been discarded. Moreover, Wesley’s original opening couplet is “Hark! how all the welkin rings / Glory to the King of Kings” The popular version is the result of alterations by various hands, most notably by Whitefield, who changed the opening couplet to the familiar one. In 1840—a hundred years after the publication of Hymns and Sacred Poems—Mendelssohn composed a cantata to commemorate Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type printing, and it is music from this cantata, adapted by the English musician William H. Cummings to fit the lyrics of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”, that propels the carol known today.The original hymn text was written as a “Hymn for Christmas-Day” by Charles Wesley, included in the 1739 John Wesley collection Hymns and Sacred Poems. The first stanza (verse) describes the announcement of Jesus’ birth. Wesley’s original hymn began with the opening line “Hark how all the Welkin rings”. This was changed to the familiar “Hark! the Herald Angels sing” by George Whitefield in his 1754 Collection of Hymns for Social Worship. A second change was made in the 1782 publication of the Tate and Brady New Version of the Psalms of David. In this work, Whitefield’s adaptation of Wesley’s hymn appears, with the repetition of the opening line “Hark! the Herald Angels sing/ Glory to the newborn king” at the end of each stanza, as it is commonly sung today.