Hark the Herald Angels Sing

The music is from the second chorus of a contata by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) written in 1840 to commemorate Johann Gutenberg and the invention of printing. The words are from a hundred years earlier, written in 1739 by Charles Wesley. In 1855, after both Wesley and Mendelssohn were dead, Dr. William Cummings put the words and music together in spite of evidence that neither author nor composer would have approved, and voila, we have a Christmas Carol. I play it here on my Nechville Classic Eclipse.