Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

The tune now sung to Charles Wesley's hymn of 1739 was not written for it. Mendelssohn composed it in 1840 as a chorus of his Festgesang, a cantata for the Leipzig celebrations of the fourth centenary of printing, and told his publisher the music would suit almost any text except a sacred one. In 1855 the English musician William Hayman Cummings fitted Wesley's words to it, against the composer's explicit view, and the combination displaced every earlier setting. It is now among the most widely sung Christmas hymns in English.