Hark, How All The Welkin Rings
AS cathedrals around the country start to ring with the glorious sounds of choirs performing Christmas music, one carol captures the essence of the season perhaps more
than any other—hark! The Herald
Angels Sing, which sees its 280th anniversary this year.
When Methodist leader Charles
Wesley sat down to write his Hymn for Christmas Day in 1739, he could hardly have imagined that it would become the soundtrack of Christmas for generations. He would, however, be less than flattered to find his work owes much of its success to an adaptation he had vehemently opposed.
In the mid 18th century, another cleric, George Whitefield, shortened Wesley’s carol and gave it a new beginning and a new name: Hark! the Herald Angels Sing replaced Hark, How All the Welkin Rings. It appears Wesley disapproved of this alteration, possibly because he and his brother, John, were increasingly put out by other writers making free with their texts.
In the preface of his 1780 book Hymns for the Use of the People called
Methodists, John wrote: ‘Many gentlemen have done my brother and me… the honour to reprint many of our hymns. Now, they are perfectly welcome so to do, provided they print them just as they are. But I desire they would not attempt to mend them; for they really are not able.’
Charles might have been even more horrified at another radical change a century later. In 1855, William H. Cummings restyled the second part of Mendelssohn’s Festgesang to fit Whitefield’s adaptation of the hymn, supplanting the solemn music that Wesley had originally envisaged. Yet the combination of a secular tune that would, according to Mendelssohn himself, ‘never do to sacred words’, with a deeply religious text worked surprisingly well. Sung at the end of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve (first come, first served; doors open at 1.30pm), the carol marks the start of Christmas proper. Carla Passino