Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is an English Christmas carol.

History

The main part of the text was written by Charles Wesley, which was published in 1739 in the collection Hymns and Sacred Poems. There, the text begins with the line: " Hark! How All The Welkin Rings / Glory To The King of Kings ". George Whitefield, who worked with Wesley, it later changed to the current version.

First, they sang the words to the tune of Amazing Grace. Wesley himself used the same tune as for the Easter hymn Christ the Lord is Risen Today.

The current melody of the song goes back to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. She was originally part of the festive song from the Gutenberg Festival, Mendelssohn wrote in 1840 to the " fourth Säcularfeier the invention of printing " in Leipzig, as well as his Symphony No. 2 " Hymn of Praise ".

At the same time lets the strong similarity of the melodic and harmonic structure of Mendelssohn's melody with JS Bach's Gavotte from Orchestral Suite No. 4 assume a possible adaptation of Mendelssohn.

William Hayman Cummings 1855 adapted Mendelssohn's melody of the second choir " Fatherland, in your districts " and put them with Wesley's text, then in 1861 appeared as Kontrafaktur in a hymnal.

When the English publisher Edward Buxton Mendelssohn asked to be allowed inferior to the Gutenberg cantata for a publication in England with a spiritual text, this declined to strictly.

Known worldwide, the song was also by its use in the Peanuts special A Charlie Brown Christmas 1965 in a version by Vince Guaraldi.

The motivic similarity to Bach led the Australians Nigel Poole to an arrangement of the " Gavotte ", which he published as Bach 's Christmas Carol for mixed choir and piano accompaniment.