Aural Advent Calendar: Day 3
It’s two for the price of one day here at The OM Aural Advent Calendar. O Tannenbaum and half of Hark The Herald Angels Sing.
The evergreen quality of the fir tree inspired many songwriters over the years, so there are several versions of this carol in its original German. The version that is the most well-known to English speakers was written in 1824 by a Leipzig organist and teacher named Ernst Anschütz
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing! has a rather more noble pedigree, coming from the pen of Charles Wesley, a minister who, along with his brother John, founded the Methodist church. Wesley wrote over 2000 hymns during his lifetime, of which 20 are still in circulation in hymn books of various stripes today.
The original 1739 tune was the one we know today as Amazing Grace although Wesley himself had Christ The Lord Is Risen Today in mind. In 1840, Mendelssohn wrote his secular cantata Festgesang an die Künstler to commemorate Gutenberg’s achievements 400 years earlier. Although he said that it wasn’t appropriate for sacred music because of its gavotte qualities, organist William Hayman Cummings
set Wesley’s text to the second chorus ‘Vaterland, in deinem Gauen.’
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