THE TUNE.
“Mendelssohn” is the favorite musical interpreter of the hymn. It is a noble and spirited choral from Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's cantata, “Gott ist Licht.”
“JOY TO THE WORLD, THE LORD IS COME!”
This inspirational lyric of Dr. Watts never grows old. It was written in 1719.
Joy to the world! the Saviour reigns!
Let men their songs employ
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy.
Dr. Edward Hodges (1796–1867) wrote an excellent psalm-tune to it which is still in occasional use, but the music united to the hymn in the popular heart is “Antioch,” an adaptation from Handel's Messiah. This companionship holds unbroken from hymnal to hymnal and has done so for sixty or seventy years; and, in spite of its fugue, the tune—apparently by some magic of its own—contrives to enlist the entire voice of a congregation, the bass falling in on the third beat as if by intuition. The truth is, the tune has become the habit of the hymn, and to the thousands who have it by heart, as they do in every village where there is a singing school, “Antioch” is “Joy to the World,” and “Joy to the World” is “Antioch.”