The Original Lyrics To “Hark The Herald Angels Sing”

As part of a larger project, I recently went looking for songs celebrating specific inventions. We have plenty of songs about battles and…

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As part of a larger project, I recently went looking for songs celebrating specific inventions. We have plenty of songs about battles and dance parties, but there don’t seem to be many about penicillin. I think these used to be more of a thing, but with the advent of mass media the whole space of “look at how awesome this new technology is” music got taken over by advertisements. I’m sure there’s plenty of artistic merit there, but ad music is hard to appreciate as paeans while you need to have your skepticism shields at maximum strength. Slim Gaillard’s jazz songs about bagels, matzo balls, and potato chips might be the last gasp of unironic appreciation of new tech, if you define “new” and “tech” broadly enough.

I did find a few nice post-adpocalypse ones, though. Country music has Loretta Lynn’s The Pill, Al Stewart croons a playful song about the reaction to the invention of champagne (“it’s like all the stars of the heavens are in my mouth!”), and Nightwish’s epic Music introduced me to the unlikely genre of symphonic humanist death metal. Many of these modern songs celebrate the inventor as much as the invention, with my favorite being the Carmela Vitale song, from a British radio variety show, praising the inventor of that little table thing in the middle of a delivery pizza. Quantitatively, the invention of the Korean alphabet might have the most celebrations in song, as it’s the subject of a major holiday.

The big plot twist for me was discovering that one of the most-sung songs in my country, the Christmas carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing, was originally an ode to the Gutenberg printing press. Like most great Christmas songs, it was written by a Jew, the 19th-century German composer Felix Mendelssohn (grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn). First performed on this day in 1840, the song celebrated the 400th-ish anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, one of the most catalytic moments in the history of civilization. The middle verse was later transformed into Hark, keeping the themes of reverence and communication but discarding the tech. The carol has so thoroughly eclipsed the cantata that it’s hard to find a recording of people singing it–most of the time if you listen to a track labeled “Gutenberg Cantata” you end up getting rickrolled by Jesus. And I couldn’t find a good English translation anywhere.

So I wrote a bad one. I took some liberties with the text, prioritizing the vibes and the original rhyme scheme over literalism. The German nationalism in one verse aged about as poorly as anything can possibly age, so I’ve mostly replaced it with an acknowledgement that Gutenberg wasn’t the literal first to invent moveable type, just the one who got it to go viral worldwide. Celebrating Gutenberg is pretty typical of how we celebrate inventions–the important thing isn’t really who got there first. Even Carmela Vitale wasn’t the first to come up with the pizza table thing: Claudio Daniel Troglia was issued a patent for it in Argentina 11 years earlier. We celebrate the person who got the thing to us.

So, with parts of it roughly singable to a tune you probably know, here is the one true Gutenberg Cantata.

1. Choral

Commemorate we now in song

the great hour of our joy.

A thousand voices sing along

thanks to such a clever toy.

Who in thickly shrouded night?

Who has brought forth so much light?

Praise Johannes Gutenberg!

Centuries his light has shone,

spreading out throughout the world.

All obscured now widely known,

The bound up scroll is now unfurled.

Once different lands knew different things.

Now the world with one voice sings.

Praise Johannes Gutenberg!

2. Lied (this part can be sung to the tune of Hark the Herald Angels Sing)

German was his great machine,

Printed word made European.

Asian alone this joy had been.

All printed books were in Korean,

’til a German engineer

shared his work both far and near.

Now we all share in the power.

Citizens of the land of Light.

His corpus grows with every hour,

For one long dead he sure can write!

All that we have ever won

is work that Gutenberg has done.

Still the darkness schemes and rages,

Ignorance knows a thousand tricks.

We fight pages with more pages,

Stir more truth into the mix.

In the blade you may well doubt.

With the word the light wins out.

Gutenberg, courageous man,

We follow now your battle plan.

3. Allegro molto

The one who said “Let there be light!”

His the power, his the glory!

He comforts you in your long night,

Reading you a bedtime story.

Faith in the holy word

Was your defense, your shield, your hoard.

So your victory was assured.

Hail oh conqueror of death,

now minds live on past their last breath.

You ascend and take us with!

4. Choral

Hail to him and hail to us!

Our voices echo ‘round the Earth.

Millions now are rich and famous,

All shall hear of each new birth!

Let the light shine ever through,

Fervently of you we plead!

From all of us to all of you,

give us something more to read!