Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we are looking at classical tunes for classic hymns.

Let's start with Christmas and the hymn, What Child is This?

The tune for that hymn is a 16th century English melody known as Greensleeves.

The full title was A New Northern Diddy of Ye Lady Greensleeves from 1580. It was used for a variety of songs.

Shakespeare references it through his character Falstaff. William Chatterton Dix used the tune for his hymn.

Dix wrote that hymn first as a poem entitled The Manger Throne in 1865.

He then paired it with the tune, renamed the hymn, and published it in 1871.

Moving from the 16th century to the classical era of music, we have

another Christmas hymn, Hark the Herald Angels Sing by Charles Wesley. Charles Wesley originally

titled this hymn, A Hymn for Christmas Day, and he wrote the first line as, Hark, how all the Welkin rings. Well, thankfully,

George Whitfield suggested an edit, and so we have Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and that was in 1739.

A century later, Felix Mendelssohn wrote the Festga song, also known as the Gutenberg

cantata for the 400th anniversary of Gutenberg's invention.

The tenor and church musician William Hyman Cummings put Wesley's century-old hymn to Mendelssohn's

tune, and that's how we sing it today.

Next up, let's go to John Newton and his hymn, Glorious Things of The Are Spoken.

Newton published it in his only hymnal in 1779.

It gets paired with a piece by Franz Joseph Haydn. Hayden had written a tune for Francis

the Second, the Emperor of Austria, and it is known as the Austrian hymn. While Hayden was in

England, he was very impressed by how the British were so galvanized by their anthem, God Save the King. So he wrote

one for Austria. And then that tune got put to the hymn by Newton that celebrates the King

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