Wesley Corpus

Last updated: November 8, 2010. 2Hymns on the Great Festivals, and other Occasions (Madison, NJ: The Charles Wesley Society, 1996), 7-47. See also Martin V. Clarke, "John Frederick Lampe's Hymns on the Great Festivals and Other Occasions," in Music and the Wesleys, ed. N. Temperley S. Banfield (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 141-53. Festival Hymns (1746)1 Baker list, 124 Editorial Introduction: In his desire to provide a rich set of resources for celebrating the major Christian festivals on the life of Christ, Charles Wesley published four pamphlet hymn collections in 1745-46: Nativity Hymns (1745), Resurrection Hymns (1746), Ascension Hymns (1746), and Whitsunday Hymns (1746). Like the other hymn collections published by the Wesley brothers to that point, these pamphlets included only the words. There was no music, or even suggested tunes. During this same time period the Wesley brothers became acquainted with John Frederick Lampe (1703-51). Lampe was a German-born musician and composer, a friend and compatriot of G. F. Handel. He first met John Wesley in late 1745, after experiencing a religious awakening through reading Wesley's Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion. Lampe and Charles Wesley made contact through mutual friends in early 1746, and Charles came to appreciate how Lampe's musical settings might increase the appeal of his hymns among a genteel audience (see his MS Journal for 29 March 1746). Accordingly, Charles encouraged Lampe to compose a number of musical settings for some of his hymns on the Christian festivals. The result was issued in October 1746 as Hymns on the Great Festivals. Charles was clearly responsible for selecting the twenty-four hymns included in this collection. Twenty-one of them had been published previously (indicated in blue font in the Table of Contents below), most in the series of pamphlets he was just completing. One of the hymns had been written by Samuel Wesley Jr. The remainder were by Charles. The three hymns that appear in printed form first in this collection were taken from manuscript, and are included later (with some revisions) in his collected Hymns and Sacred Poems (1749). In addition to providing the musical score, it was almost certainly Lampe who introduced the textual changes (when compared to their prior published form) that occur in some of the hymns, for musical purposes.