People like to make cracks about the best Christmas music being written by Jews, but you can’t blame Felix Mendelssohn for getting that ball rolling. The music Mendelssohn composed in 1840 wasn’t intended for Christmas at all — it was part of a cantata to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Johann Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press. Its original lyrics praise Gutenberg for lighting the torch of learning in the Fatherland. Here’s what the relevant section of the cantata sounded like.
Mendelssohn’s music was composed a century after the text of a “Hymn for Christmas-Day” was written by Charles Wesley, one of 6,500 hymns he tossed off. Wesley wanted his words set to slow and solemn music, which wasn’t his only mistaken notion. Some of his original lyrics also missed the final cut, and good thing, too, or modern choirs would be singing “Hark! How All the Welkin Rings” (the welkin is what we call the sky, known in ye olden days as the firmament).
It was British organist William H. Cummings who in 1855 rearranged the music and massaged the lyrics into the version of the song we know today. This performance comes from “The Glorious Sound of Christmas,” the now-iconic LP with the Temple University Concert Choir released in 1962. The arrangement, to what I’m sure would be Charles Wesley’s consternation, is joyous and uplifting rather than slow and solemn.
This version was recorded three years later, and is included on an even more iconic Christmas album.
