Background

Charles Wesley the youngest of eighteen children and English priest, wrote more than three thousand hymns in the 18th century, many of which—such as “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” and “Love Divine All Loves Excelling”—are still sung by millions. 

Wesley began his formal education at the Westminster School in 1716. He then studied at Christ College in Oxford. In 1735, at the age of twenty-eight, Charles sailed for Georgia to become secretary to General James Oglethorpe. In short order, Wesley found himself missing his home and family and feeling stifled in his new role. In less than a year he quit his job and returned to London. 

Assigned to a church in Islington, England, Wesley immediately began making waves. His outlook was radically different from most English clergy of the time. He visited prisons, was a strong supporter of individual thinking, often held church services outdoors, and believed Christian music needed to be infused with heavy doses of personal witness, energy, and enthusiasm.  His goal in writing hymns was to teach the poor and illiterate sound doctrine  He kept his mind sharp through daily Bible study and hours spent writing music. 

In 1737, during his daily quiet time, Wesley was working on a new Christmas composition.  Wesley, inspired by the sounds of London church bells while walking to church on Christmas Day, wrote the “Hark” poem about a year after his conversion to be read on Christmas Day. 

When he jotted down the line, “Hark! how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of Kings,” the new song quickly fell together. Welkin, a word foreign to most today, literally means the “vault of heaven makes a long noise.”  It is the sky or the firmament of the heavens, even the highest celestial sphere of the angels.

Thus, when heaven sends forth a loud pronouncement, the entire power of the King is revealed. This term certainly supported the common eighteenth-century notion of the three-tiered universe, where the top tier includes the celestial beings, the lowest tier the normal activities of humanity (birth, death, marriage, work, sickness), and the natural created order (rain, drought, natural disasters), and the middle tier where celestial beings influence the activities of beings and events on earth with their superhuman powers.

Set to one of the writer’s own unique melodies, “Hark! How All The Welkin Rings” premiered in Wesley’s own church in 1739 and quickly gained favor with other congregations. It first was published under the title “Hymn for Christmas Day”  in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) in ten shorter stanzas, each stanza half the length of the stanzas we sing today.

Later in 1753 when his old college friend, George Whitefield, finally published the song, their friendship was tested.  Whitefield, a former bartender turned Calvinist preacher, was often at theological odds with Wesley. After being ordained as a priest in the Church of England, Whitefield’s fiery rhetoric and evangelical messages kept him in constant trouble with the church. Because of his militant approach. Whitefield was soon banned from the Anglican churches of his day and forced to mostly preach in privately organized, open-air meetings. From Whitefield’s informal meetings sprang the revival movement that would soon explode in the United States.

When Whitefield published Wesley’s Christmas song, he changed the words to Hark! the Herald Angels sing without consulting the writer. Wesley was not happy. Nowhere in the Bible did angels sing about the birth of Christ! Yet because of Whitefield’s change in one line, today most people believe that Luke 2:13 refers to singing angels rather than, “A great company of the heavenly host” [spiritual beings not normally seen who watch over man] appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’”

As long as he lived, Wesley never sang Whitefield’s rework of his song but another did. One of those was William Cummings.

In 1782 the revised opening couplet became repeated as the refrain. ( Hark! the herald angels sing,   “Glory to the new-born King.”

The text was extensively changed and shortened by various other eighteenth-century editors as well. With a few words changed the Psalter Hymnal version is essentially the same as the one published in John Kempthorne’s Select Portions of Psalms… and Hymns (1810).

For the first 120 years, the words were sung to various tunes but that changed in the 1850s. 

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed a cantata, Festgesang (1840), celebrating the 400th anniversary of the invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg. A chorus from this cantata was adapted and paired with Wesley’s text in The Congregational Psalmist (1858) by an English musician and singer under Mendelssohn, William H. Cummings (1831-1915). A famous and influential hymn collection, Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861) carried this arrangement and helped to standardize its form and promote its broader use.  

Mendelssohn ironically declared that the “soldier-like” tune would never be suited to a sacred text.  One hundred years earlier, Charles Wesley had suggested that his own hymn text “Hark, how all the welkin [heaven] rings” should be sung to a slow and solemn melody. 

In 1855, William Cummings ignored by Mendelssohn and Wesley combined Mendelssohn’s Gutenberg tribute, “Festgesang an die Knustler,” with Wesley’s text including the Whitefield rewrite, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” The result was a dramatic change unimagined by either composer.

Cummings’s arrangement of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” was first printed in a Methodist hymnal in 1857. Over the next few years, it was adopted by other denominations and publishers. Within a decade, the new “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” was one of the most recognized carols in the world.

Cummings had a lifelong love of Felix Mendelssohn, sparked when he sang at age sixteen in the first London performance of Elijah, which was directed by Mendelssohn himself. As a young boy, Cummings had been a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral and later sang in the choirs of the Temple Church, Westminster Abbey, and the Chapel Royal. Cummings became a famous tenor–he sang in oratorios and was especially known for his evangelist role in the Bach passions. He taught voice at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Normal College and School for the Blind in London and was also an accomplished organist.