Sir Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Composer and His Hymn Tunes

Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900) is the epitome of a Victorian composer, with his life and career inextricably linked to his monarch. Queen Victoria was crowned feve years before Sullivan’s birth, knighted him in 1883, insisted that Sullivan be buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then died exactly two months after him. 

Today, Sullivan is best known as the musical half of Gilbert and Sullivan. W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) provided the comic scripts and Sullivan was the composer for their well-known operettas. Thus, some might question the decision to permanently etch his name on Cowden Hall at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, considering the more obvious sacred composers such as Bach, Handel, Palestrina, and Tallis whose names also appear. 

As this article will show, there was more to Sullivan and his career than operettas. He was an exceptionally well-trained English musician and composer—a prodigy who wrote his !rst sacred anthem at age eight. He sang in the newly rejuvenated royal boys’ choir, and at fourteen he won a scholarship to study at conservatories in London and then Leipzig. In his later career, Sullivan taught and mentored numerous musicians and was a tireless promoter of British composers. 

While some have dubbed him the greatest of Victorian composers, for various reasons Sullivan has received less recognition for his sacred and classical compositions. He lived during a generation of many great European composers—born during a five-year period that includes the births of Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Massenet, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Fauré. At the end of the twentieth century, British composers were far less often performed or recorded than those of Germany, Austria, Russia, or France.¹ With the commercial success and popular recognition attained from his operettas, Sullivan spent less time on anthems and other sacred works than contemporaries such as C. V. Stanford (1852–1924) or C. H. H. Parry (1848–1918). Finally, compared to these high-status composers, he was the victim of a certain snobbery, due both to his humble origins and lack of a university education. 

Although often critical of Sullivan, English hymnologist Erik Routley praised him as “the most gifted melodist of his time,” concluding he was “England’s greatest show-business musician since Handel, and perhaps her most gifted native composer since Purcell.”² While Sullivan’s gift of melody was manifest in both his operetta songs and hymn tunes, in reality the latter came !rst. He wrote or arranged 136 hymn tunes in his lifetime, most of them between 1871 and 1874, during the lull between his initial and all subsequent collaborations with Gilbert. His best-known tune is S$. G%&$&'(%, used for “Onward Christian soldiers” in nearly 1,000 hymnals, including twelve U.S. Baptist hymnals from 1921 to 2010—and the only Sullivan tune in the 1921 hymnal co-edited by I. E. Reynolds, director of the School of Sacred Music at Southwestern.³

Upbringing and Training

Sir Arthur’s father, Thomas Sullivan (1805–1866), was born in Ireland to Irish parents, but raised in England while his father served in the British Army. He served as a bandsman at Sandhurst from 1820 to 1835, and then as sergeant bandmaster from 1845 to 1857 before becoming a faculty member at the new Royal Military School of Music from 1859 until his death. He and his wife Mary had two sons: Fredric (1837–1877) and Arthur. After Fred died of tuberculosis, the never-married Arthur employed his wealth to support Fred’s seven surviving children. 

At Sandhurst, Arthur began piano lessons at age five, learned to play every wind instrument from his bandmaster father, and was steeped in Anglican worship at the Sandhurst parish church. Beyond his early musical exposure and natural talent, his musical career was shaped by two early opportunities: acceptance into the Chapel Royal boys’ choir and winning a scholarship that funded five years of conservatory studies. 

Seeking to emulate Purcell’s choirboy experience, the young Sullivan had fixated on joining the Chapel Royal.⁴ One month shy of his twelfth birthday, Sullivan accompanied himself on piano while auditioning for the choir. Because choristers were expected to serve five years and his voice would break before then, his April 1854 appointment required a waiver from the Bishop of London. Sullivan’s choirmaster was Rev. Thomas Helmore (1811–1890),⁵ who in 1846 became the first clergyman to lead the Chapel Royal children’s choir since the Reformation. Helmore focused both on high performance standards and the physical and emotional care of the boys, ending his predecessor’s neglect.⁶ When Sullivan joined, Helmore lodged ten choirboys in his home with his wife and (then) three children. He became not only a teacher and father figure to Sullivan, but also a mentor and friend, officiating at Fred’s wedding and their parents’ funerals. 

Sullivan’s time at the Chapel Royal confirmed his intended career direction. His immersion in Anglican church music both formed him spiritually and introduced him to the choral repertoire of early Tudor composers. He quickly became a soloist and thrived for thirty-eight months until his voice changed at age fifteen. 

Through a variety of adolescent escapades, Sullivan also cemented a lifelong friendship with composer Sir John Stainer (1840–1901), then a St. Paul’s choirboy, who eventually succeeded his teacher Sir John Goss (1800–1880) as St. Paul’s organist from 1872 to 1888. A pallbearer at Sullivan’s funeral, Stainer (like Helmore) was Sullivan’s fierce defender against later musical critics. 

At age fourteen, Sullivan became the first recipient of a London scholarship memorializing Felix Mendelssohn.⁷ The youngest of seven finalists, he edged out Joseph Barnby (1838–1896), who in later decades collaborated with Sullivan on various musical projects. The scholarship funded study the Sullivans otherwise could not afford: two years in London and three years in Leipzig. 

In what proved to be his !nal year as a chorister, in September 1856 Sullivan matriculated at the Royal Academy of Music. He studied harmony and composition with John Goss, a former Chapel Royal chorister, as well as piano and violin. He lived the first year with Helmore and the second with his parents after they moved to London. 

After the Academy, in September 1858 Sullivan enrolled at the Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig—the same month as Edvard Grieg, who was 13 months younger.⁸ The conservatory was founded in 1843 by Mendelssohn, music director of the famed Gewandhaus Orchestra, using its musicians as its faculty. Sullivan took lessons in piano and violin, and like the other students studied music theory, composition, performing and conducting. While there, he composed an anthem, two string quartets, an overture, and incidental music to Shakespeare’s Tempest. In Leipzig, he was impressed both by the performance standards of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the sacred music of J. S. Bach, then in the midst of a major revival. 

Sullivan was also impressed with a lifelong love of the music of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Schubert. Evidence of the latter can be found in Schubert’s overture to Rosamunde, where Routley observed “you can hear tune after tune that could have come straight from Sullivan’s pen.”⁹ At the same time, Sullivan’s desire to become a British composer necessarily sent him in the footsteps of his most notable predecessors, Purcell and Handel. 

Sullivan’s studies concluded in April 1861 with great promise. As his biographer Ian Bradley commented, “He left Leipzig still just 18 with his teachers convinced that he had the talent and potential to be a great conductor, a great classical composer, perhaps even a concert pianist, and the expectation that he would make his mark in at least one of these fields, if not in all three.”¹⁰ As the following discussion shows, Sullivan continued composing throughout his adult life. 

Musical Career

After Leipzig, from 1861 to 1872 Sullivan was full-time organist at two London churches and later served as a part-time organist at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Royal contacts and other opportunities came from his friendship with George Grove (1820–1900), concert promoter and later editor of Grove’s Dictionary.¹¹

Orchestral music. Although Sullivan won widespread recognition when Grove arranged a successful April 1862 premier of his complete Tempest incidental music, he found only limited success with later inciden-tal music.¹² He wrote five overtures from 1858 to 1870, the best known being In Memoriam (1866), written to mark his father’s death. Also in 1866, Sullivan composed and premiered both his Symphony in E and Cello Concerto in D at the Crystal Palace, which—like Tempest excerpts and In Memoriam—are available in recordings. 

Choral music. Sullivan wrote a number of pieces for choir, including seventeen anthems from 1850 to 1874. As someone who admired Handel’s career and Mendelssohn’s music, Sullivan spent considerable time both reviving existing oratorios and writing his own. In addition to two secular cantatas—Kenilworth (1864) and On Shore and Sea (1871)—Sullivan wrote four sacred oratorios: The Prodigal Son (1869), The Light of the World (1873), The Martyr of Antioch (1880), and The Golden Legend (1886).¹³

Sullivan also received various royal commissions, including one for Prince Albert’s 1863 wedding and one to celebrate Albert’s recovery from typhoid fever—the 1872 Festival Te Deum. His final composition, the Boer War Te Deum, was commissioned in 1900. Completed four months before his death, the climax of the 15-minute piece builds upon an unmistakable quotation from his most popular tune, St. Gertrude, A week after the war ended in 1902, the work premiered at St. Paul’s Cathedral.¹⁴ With his royal ties and commissions, Sullivan became the closest thing to a royal composer since Handel and Purcell. 

Operettas. Both in the nineteenth century and today, Sullivan’s greatest fame and fortune came as the composer of a series of light operas or operettas. He wrote fourteen operettas with Gilbert from 1872 to 1896. At their peak from 1879 to 1889, they released six new operettas (including The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and The Gondoliers) that each ran for more than a year.¹⁵ Their final eight operettas premiered at the Savoy theatre, purposely built in 1881 for their light operas and those of others. Sullivan was never considered a serious opera composer; his operettas were likened to those of Jacques Offenbach. Still, his most popular operettas (also including HMS Pinafore) continued to be performed throughout twentieth century and are recognized as the direct antecedent of twenti-ethcentury English and American musical theater. 

Songs. Songs provided a sizable income for some Victorian composers through sheet music sales to amateur musicians. Biographer Arthur Jacobs lists more than one-hundred songs composed by Sullivan while Bradley classifies two dozen of these as sacred songs.¹⁶ Jacobs also lists more than a dozen part songs, intended to be sung in harmony rather than as a duet (or trio) between soloists. Sullivan’s more than one-hundred hymn tunes are discussed below. 

Conducting. Sullivan’s career also included editing, teaching, mentoring and conducting. His greatest influence on Victorian classical music tastes was perhaps as seven-time conductor of the triennial Leeds Festival (1880–1898). Each featured eight concerts over four days, performed by London orchestral musicians and soloists, with a locally recruited choir. 

Sullivan was selected as the more malleable leader than two more expe-ienced foreign-born conductors active in England: incumbent Michael Costa and Hans Richter, Wagner’s preferred conductor. Sullivan’s fame attracted interest to the festival, as did the appointment (through Sullivan’s influence) of Prince Alfred as president and royal patron. 

The 1880 program illustrates the daunting conducting responsibilities. With a choir of 306, it included Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Beethoven’s Ninth, Mozart’s Symphony No. 4, Beethoven’s Mass in C, and excerpts from Handel’s Samson and Haydn’s Creation. He often spotlighted English composers, as with the 1898 festival premier of Elgar’s Caractacus.¹⁷

Victorian Hymnody

Sullivan’s most lasting contribution to sacred music came through his hymn tunes, during a period of explosive interest in Victorian hymns and hymnals. His opportunity to compose (and compile) hymn tunes for congregational singing stemmed from several key developments, including the Anglican Choral Revival and an interest in producing new hymnals. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, hymn singing was new to the Church of England. It had long been central to the worship of many evangelically minded Dissenter churches, utilizing hymn texts by Watts, Wesley, and others. However, sung worship in the Church of England was limited to versi!ed psalms from the sixteenth century until 1820. 

Key elements of the nineteenth-century Anglican Choral Revival were improved performance standards encouraged by Helmore, John Jebb and John Hullah, as well as the proliferation of new and reclaimed hymns. Key leadership came from the Ecclesiological Society, founded in Cambridge by Catholic-leaning Anglicans. Their reclamation of ancient and medieval hymns was led by John Mason Neale, who translated more than one-hundred Latin and Greek hymns, while Helmore adapted medieval English chants.¹⁸ 

In 1861, Hymns Ancient & Modern (A&M) combined new and existing hymns to set the standard for a comprehensive hymnal for English hymnody and Anglican hymnody worldwide.¹⁹ Editor Sir Henry Williams Baker and music editor William Henry Monk (1829–1889) reused existing hymns and solicited new ones, both texts and tunes. Expanded editions were published in 1869, 1875, and 1889. Its success inspired more than two-hundred would-be competitors. One, Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (1870), targeted the evangelical wing of the Church of England. Another, Hymnary (1872), targeted the Catholic wing, with Sullivan’s longtime friend Barnby as music editor. A third entry was Church Hymns (1871), with 592 hymn texts. It was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established in 1698 as the first Anglican missionary society and the Church of England’s quasi-o)cial publisher. 

In 1874, SPCK published Church Hymns with Tunes (1874), highlighting Sullivan as music editor, an explicit contrast to the lesser-known Monk. By one estimate, Church Hymns with Tunes (CHWT) sold as many as ten-million copies, second only to A&M, which sold over a million copies a year and thirty-five million by 1900.²⁰ 

Sullivan’s Hymns

The explosion of hymns during the Victorian era reflected both popular interest and a certain craftsmanship of text and tune authorship. The latter included a close attention to the mood and meaning of individual words, and careful matching of purpose-written tunes to specific texts.²¹ 

Sullivan was among the most prominent of these hymn composers. While his skills at melody were demonstrated both in writing operetta songs and hymn tunes, two important points need to be made. First, as he did with operettas, Sullivan wrote hymn tunes matched to a speci!c text (even if some later pairings proved more popular than the originally intended one). The earliest of his hymn tunes were five 1867 compositions for existing texts, including two familiar ones. Sullivan wrote Falfield for Charles Wesley’s 1747 “Love Divine, all loves excelling;” while the Hymnary.org website shows the tune published with a range of texts, its last use with Wesley’s text was in 1897, supplanted by the 1870 Beecher (favored by Baptists and many others) and the 1830 Hyfrydol. Similarly, Sullivan wrote Mount Zion for August Toplady’s 1776 hymn “Rock of Ages,” but the two tunes most often printed today are the 1830 Toplady (popular in the U.S.) and 1853 Petra/Redhead (preferred in England). 

Second, writing hymn tunes preceded (and thus informed) his writing of operettas, not the other way around. Sullivan wrote forty-two of his sixty-one original hymn tunes and seventy of his seventy-five hymn tune arrangements between 1871 and 1874, mainly for two hymnals.²² Eleven new tunes were for Barnby’s Hymnary, with thirty-six tunes and sixty-nine arrangements for CHWT. Sullivan’s music !rst appeared in Hymns Ancient & Modern—the third (1875) edition—with five tunes and two arrangements, all written in 1874. 

According to Bradley, Sullivan wrote only seven hymn tunes before 1871, and an eighth (St. Gertrude) first appeared in a hymnal in 1872. After 1874, he lists eight more hymns, plus four uncredited hymns likely by Sullivan.²³ The success of Sullivan’s operettas from 1875 onward left little time for hymns or other sacred music composition. 

Table 1 lists twelve Sullivan tunes found in two U.K. Baptist hymnals (published in 1900 and 1962) and twelve U.S. Baptist hymnals from 1921 to 2010 (including hymnals associated with the Northern/American Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention denominations) alongside the texts used with these tunes in these hymnals.²⁴ For comparison, the analysis of tunes below also references five U.S. Anglican hymnals from 1916 to 2023, and four (unofficial) Church of England hymnals from 1906 to 2023.²⁵ 

Table 1. Sullivan Hymn Tunes in Baptist Hymnals²⁶

From these twenty-three hymnals, eight Sullivan tunes stand out, all written between 1871 and 1874. 

St. Gertrude. Sullivan’s most popular hymn tune by far is St. Gertrude, which Hymnary.org lists in more than 1,100 hymnals, more than his next four most popular tunes combined. It is now the preferred tune, although the second one composed, for the Rev. Sabine Baring Gould’s stirring text, “Onward, Christian soldiers,” written for a Yorkshire children’s festival processional and published in 1864 in the Musical Times. 

When first published in the second edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern (1868), “Onward, Christian soldiers” was paired with Edward J. Gauntlett’s tune Onward Christian Soldiers. In preparation for Barnby’s 1872 Hymnary, Sullivan wrote St. Gertrude as an alternate tune, publishing it with Gould’s text in the December 1871 Musical Times, then in Hymnary and CHWT. 

The success of this early Sullivan tune is remarkable, given it was the ninth of his sixty-five original hymn tunes, and written before the operettas with Gilbert. Hoch suggests the suitability of the tune for the text “reflects Sullivan’s indebtedness to his father’s profession as a director of military bands,” with a march-like “oom-pah” bass line in the harmonized hymn.²⁷ Hicks believes the music for the hymn “with its regimented rhythm and repetitive first note” gives greater prominence to “fighting for Jesus and fighting in an actual earthly army.”²⁸ 

Beyond its fit to the text, many credit Sullivan’s tune for the hymn’s lasting popularity.²⁹ In its day, it was dubbed the “Marseillaise of the Church Militant.”³⁰ Roosevelt and Churchill sang it after an August 1941 summit meeting, and it was a congregational hymn at funerals for two U.S. presidents who were World War II veterans: Presbyterian Dwight Eisenhower (1969) and Episcopalian George H. W. Bush (2018).³¹ 

Sullivan’s tune appears in all eight Anglican hymnals. The 1900 English Baptist hymnal uses a third tune, but Sullivan’s tune is used for the 1962 hymnal and all but one of the U.S. Baptist hymnals; it was the only Sullivan tune in the Baptist Hymnal of 1991 and 2008. However, since the days of George Bernard Shaw, the hymn has been controversial for its militaristic imagery and more recently has been dropped from hymnals of more liberal denominations.³² 

U.S. Baptists also sang St. Gertrude with a 1908 text, “Forward through the ages,” by Rev. Frederick Hosmer, who hymnologist John Julian termed “the most powerful and original” Unitarian hymnwriter of the late nineteenth century. Hymnary.org reports St. Gertrude as the preferred tune for this text which is published in the 1941 and 1970 ABC hymnals, three SBC hymnals from 1940 to 1975, and the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal. 

Meanwhile, three Easter hymns with Sullivan tunes have been popular with Anglicans, but less so with American Baptists: 

St. Kevin. “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain” is John Mason Neale’s translation of an eighth-century Greek text by St. John of Damascus (Example 1).³³ Sullivan wrote the 1872 tune St. Kevin and harmonization for this text in Hymnary and included it in CHWT, but English hymnal editors chose other tunes for the 1875 Hymns Ancient & Modern and sub-sequent Anglican hymnals. This text/tune pairing appears in every U.S. Anglican hymnal from 1916 to 2023,³⁴ as well as the two ABC hymnals and two other hymnals: Baptist Hymnal (1956) and Celebrating Grace (2010). 

From the opening phrase, “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness,” the energetic and joyous melody matches Neale’s text. The Hymnal (1940) recommends it be sung “with animation,” often interpreted as an allegretto tempo.³⁵ Parallel rhythms are used in each of the four phrases, with eighth notes on the third beat of the initial measure and two half notes for each closing measure. The first three phrases have different melodies but end on the dominant, while the final phrase quotes the initial phrase but resolves to the tonic. 

Example 1. St. Kevin, “Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain”³⁶

Fortunatus. “Welcome, happy morning” is a translation of a Latin text by sixth-century Italian bishop Venantius Fortunatus. Sullivan wrote Fortunatus for this text in the 1872 Hymnary, also found in CHWT and all five U.S. Anglican hymnals. However, A&M used a different tune, and the text is omitted from the other three U.K. Anglican hymnals. The pairing was in the Baptist Church Hymnal (1900), New Baptist Hymnal (1926), and Christian Worship (1941), while the 1956 Baptist Hymnal used a different tune. 

Lux Eoi. “Alleluia, alleluia, hearts and voice heavenward raise” is an original text by English bishop Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of poet William Wordsworth. Anglicans pair this text with Lux Eoi, written by Sullivan for CHWT, in both the three latest English hymnals (1924 to 2023) and all three Episcopalian hymnals.³⁷ The text is not included in any of the Baptist hymnals, but this march-like tune was used for “Round the Lord in glory seated” in Baptist Church Hymnal (1900) and “Hark, the voice of Jesus calling” in New Baptist Hymnal (1926). 

Two more Sullivan tunes appear in multiple Baptist hymnals but only one Anglican one: 

St. Edmund. Although Sullivan wrote it for another hymn, St. Edmund was paired with “Draw thou my soul, O Christ” in three U.S. Baptist hymnals—Christian Worship (1941), Baptist Hymnal (1956), and (with updated words) in Baptist Hymnal (1975)—as well as the 1929 Presbyterian and 1935 Methodist hymnals. Of the nine Anglican hymnals, it appears only in the Episcopalian Hymnal (1916). 

Samuel. Sullivan wrote Samuel for “Hushed was the evening hymn” in CHWT, a text that highlights the simple faith of the young prophet as it tells the story of Samuel and Eli. Bradley reports that Sullivan’s setting is “adjudged his best hymn tune by several musicologists.”³⁸ However, of the six U.K. hymnals surveyed, the pairing appears only in the 1962 Baptist hymnal. It is found in Coleman’s 1926 and 1933 Baptist hymnals, the 1916 Episcopalian hymnal, and 1938 Canadian Anglican hymnal—as well as 1940 Mennonite and 1941 Adventist hymnals—but not any major U.S. denominational hymnal after that. The tune also appears with “Father who art alone” in Christian Worship. 

Finally, some believe that Sullivan’s modesty has caused history to underappreciate two contributions to hymnody: 

Noel. Noel (1874) is Sullivan’s second most famous tune in Britain, written for the 1849 Christmas carol by Massachusetts Unitarian minister Edmund Sears, “It came upon a midnight clear.” In the U.S., the best-known tune is Carol, written for this text in 1850 by Richard Storrs Willis. Among the sixteen American hymnals, Carol appears in all Anglican and all but one of the Baptist ones: the text was missing from Reynolds and Coleman’s 1921 Kingdom Songs, but was one of four familiar carols added to Coleman’s 1926 Modern Hymnal. 

Noel was the only tune published with this text for five English hymnals— the 1900 and 1962 Baptist and the 1906, 1986, and 2023 Anglican hymnals. However, the text is absent from the 1924 (and earlier 1861 and 1885) editions of the influential A&M. Sullivan’s tune is the one still performed by famous English choirs, including all their respective recordings in music catalogs, and the only one sung at King’s College Christmas Eve services, where it was sung ten times from 1998 to 2025.³⁹ Sullivan’s Noel was included as a second tune in three U.S. Anglican hymnals from 1940 to 2017. 

Noel was first published in CHWT as a “Traditional Air rearranged,” based on a traditional English melody (Example 2). However, Bradley concludes that while the Herefordshire tune Eardisley comprises the opening eight bars (two phrases), the remaining nine bars (two phrases) were newly written by Sullivan, as was the harmonization of the resulting tune.⁴⁰ 

Example 2. Noel, “It Came upon a Midnight Clear”⁴¹

The original two phrases walking up the fifth correspond to Sharp’s definition of a typical English folk song: four-bar phrases with simple rhythms, and mainly stepwise motion within a limited range.⁴² Sullivan’s new phrases are slightly more adventuresome: the third phrase is the only one to walk down rather than up and the only one with a dotted rhythm, while the !nal phrase begins with an octave leap before echoing passages from the first two phrases. Similarly, Sullivan’s harmonies become more adventuresome: the chords in the initial phrases are mainly I-IV-I and I-V-I, both ending on the tonic. However, the third phrase introduces secondary dominants and diminished chords, with accidentals in the inner parts as leading tones to D and C. “en the last phrase works its way back to F by way of a secondary dominant emphasizing G. 

So, while often credited as “arranged by A. S. Sullivan,” Sullivan’s adaptation is more than just an arrangement—in fact it parallels the many folk melodies credited as “by” Vaughan Williams in modern hymnals. Thus the 1986 New English Hymnal uses identical language to credit Noel and Sussex: as “English Traditional Melody adapted” respectively by Sullivan and Vaughan Williams. However, the 1962 Baptist Hymn Book uses Sullivan’s adaptation without credit when paired with a new harmonization. 

Despite its tune name and strong association with Christmas, American hymnals have used Noel for newer texts. The Episcopalian Hymnal 1982 also uses it for “Praise God for John,” honoring St. John the Evangelist. Celebrating Grace keeps Noel away from Christmas, pairing it with the 1992 text “O God in who all life begins.” 

St. Clement. “Te day Thou gavest” is normally sung to the tune St. Clement, first published and attributed to Clement Scholefield by Sullivan in CHWT. However, several scholars argue that—after comparing the style of this tune to some forty other Scholefield tunes and Sullivan’s own work—Sullivan’s assistance to Scholefield went beyond merely hymnal editor to co-authorship; others are more cautious, questioning the lack of documentary proof.⁴³ 

The hymn with this text and tune are published in all nine U.K. and U.S. Anglican hymnals from 1906 to 2023. Although the hymn has been a fixture of Anglican evensong worship for 150 years—and was sung at the 2022 funeral of Elizabeth II— it is not included in any of the U.S. Baptist hymnals, but it is in the 1962 British Baptist hymnal. 

Of these eight tunes, four were written for Barnby’s Hymnary: St. Gertrude, St. Kevin, Fortunatus, and St. Edmund, while the other four were written for CHWT. 

The eight are but a fraction of the Sullivan tunes sung in England at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, hymnal editor (and longtime friend) John Stainer included twenty-eight Sullivan tunes in the 1898 Presbyterian Church Hymnary.⁴⁴

Conclusion

Arthur Sullivan was the epitome of a Victorian composer, a symbol of his era. In the early twentieth century, one English musical historian called Sullivan “probably the most widely popular English composer who has ever lived.”⁴⁵ Sullivan was also a leading contributor to the explosive growth of Victorian hymnody— and yet his hymns are rarely found today, particularly in English hymnals. What happened? 

One possible explanation is that Sullivan came of age too late, at the tail end of the Anglican Choral Revival. Sullivan returned from Leipzig and began his career in 1862, the year after the first edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and he was nineteen years younger than two composers who enjoyed enduring reputations based on tunes published in A&M. J. B. Dykes (1823–1876) was a favorite of music editor W. H. Monk, who selected seven Dykes tunes for his first edition and fifty-seven for the 1875 edition (which had six Sullivan tunes). Indeed, the popularity of Dykes’s tunes is matched only by those of Monk himself—works that Routley dismissed as “never vulgar, never extravagant, often distractingly dull” from “a master of the simple, ordinary, serviceable tune that does its work and then quietly fades out.”⁴⁶ However, such ordinary hymns were sung for more than forty years at A&M parishes, and thus many continued on through later English hymnals. Sometimes, timing is everything. 

More frequently, musicologists have pointed to the shift in tastes at the turn of the century and the end of the Victorian era, which was marked by sentimentality and national pride. While sentimentality was an inherent attribute of the Romantic movement in art and music that extended far beyond Victorian culture, Sullivan’s favorite composers—Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn—were exemplars of such sentimentality in nineteenth-century music.⁴⁷ At the same time, the dominant ethos during the prosperity of Victorian Britain valued order and stability, attributes rejected by many English musicians and critics at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴⁸ 

Instead, university-educated composers from wealthy parents—notably Parry and Stanford—were hailed as representing a so-called “English Musical Renaissance.”⁴⁹ Key music critics such as Joseph Bennett and John Fuller-Maitland promoted these composers (their personal friends) and led successful efforts to reduce the prominence of the lower-born (and more popular) Sullivan, resulting in his ouster as conductor of the Leeds Festival after 1898.⁵⁰ 

Against Victorian hymns, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) used his position as music editor of The English Hymnal (1906, rev. 1933) and Songs of Praise (1925, 1931) to impose his self-de!ned norms of “good taste.”⁵¹ In the musical preface to The English Hymnal, he devotes two pages to the choice of music, with particular emphasis on excluding previously popular tunes: “many of the tunes of the present day which have become familiar and, probably merely from association, popular with congregations are quite unsuitable to their purpose. More often than not they are positively harmful to those who sing and hear them.”⁵² 

Vaughan Williams singled out sentimental tunes for scorn: “It is indeed a moral rather than a musical issue. No doubt it requires a certain effort to tune oneself to the moral atmosphere implied by a fine melody; and it is far easier to dwell in the miasma of the languishing and sentimental hymn tunes which so often disfigure our services.”⁵³ Routley endorsed the 1906 hymnal’s exclusion of Sullivan’s music as representing “more advanced musical taste,” later claiming that Sullivan’s hymns are the “least sincere, the most pretentious and misconceived, of any written by a major Victorian composer.”⁵⁴ 

Thus, three U.K. Anglican hymnals since 1900 had only three Sullivan tunes or arrangements: The English Hymnal (1906), New English Hymnal (1986), and Revised English Hymnal (2023), as compared to seven for the 1875 edition of A&M and eleven for Barnby’s Hymnary.⁵⁵ Further from Vaughan Williams’s shadow, the three Episcopal Church hymnals (1916, 1940, 1982) respectively retained nine, eight, and six hymns. By comparison, among Baptist hymnals, the English ones included ten (1900) and fourteen hymns (1962). Two earlier U.S. ones included eight: New Baptist Hymnal (1926) and Christian Worship (1941). Thus 1926— the year Cowden Hall was built—marked a high-water mark for Sullivan’s U.S. fame and influence—at least with Baptist and Episcopal hymnal editors. 

In the twenty-first century, Sullivan’s music has enjoyed a revival both in performance and scholarship, with books by Ian Bradley and Benedict Taylor.⁵⁶ Bradley argues that Sullivan’s music uniquely reflects a kind and amiable personality that sought to both soften and uplift the world around him: 

Sullivan’s genius was to achieve an accessibility which made his music so popular, without sacri!cing inventiveness and sometimes quite daring innovation in terms of tonality and harmonization. He was not interested in writing for academic musicologists or highbrow critics. What he wanted to do was to reach people and touch their emotions, moving them to laugh, to cry, to be cheered and inspired, to have a spring in their step, and not least to express their faith.⁵⁷ 

Since the inclusion of his name on Cowden Hall at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the popularity of Sullivan’s hymn tunes ebbed and flowed over the next century, but continue to be sung by Southern Baptists and other American Christians. 

1. Representative radio playlists are di)cult to obtain, and Spotify popularity varies dramatically from month to month. However, the League of American Orchestras annually compiled lists of works performed from 1970 to 2013 by participating orchestras. For the 2000–2001 season, I identified European-born composers who were performed in more than ten orchestral programs that season (multiple performances of the same piece by one orchestra counts only once) and then compiled country totals. If Handel is counted as English, the top five were Germany (576), Russia (376), Austria (356), France (165) and England (100). If Handel is counted as German, England was seventh (63) with Elgar, Britten, and Vaughan Williams, after Italy (85) and Hungary (70), and slightly ahead of Sullivan’s idol Mendelssohn (62). See League of American Orchestras, “Orchestra Repertoire Report (ORR) 2000–2001,” https://americanorchestras.org/ orchestra-repertoire-report-orr-2000-2001.  ↩︎
2. Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns (Chicago: GIA Publications, 1981), 104.  ↩︎
3. I. E. Reynolds and Robert H. Coleman, Kingdom Songs (Nashville: Sunday School Board, 1921). It was the first of many Coleman-edited hymnals, but the only one for Reynolds. Instead, in 1915 Reynolds had been named director of the newly created music department at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which in 1921 became the School of Sacred Music, a school Reynolds led until his 1945 retirement.  ↩︎
4. Established in 1135, the Chapel Royal choir long set standards for English musical performance. Although a Chapel choir is available wherever the regent is in residence, since 1703 its principal home has been at St. James Palace, adjacent to the later (and larger) Buckingham Palace.  ↩︎
5. Helmore was a leading plainsong composer, setting his own Psalter Noted (1849), and adapting medieval chants to accompany John Mason Neale’s Hymnal Noted (1851–1854). He also led efforts to revitalize congregational singing with the Ecclesiological Society. See Dale Adelmann, The Contribution of Cambridge Ecclesiologists to the Revival of Anglican Choral Worship, 1839–62 (Brook!eld, VT: Routledge, 2019), 125–29. In 1842, Helmore was appointed to lead twice daily sung offces at St. Mark’s, Chelsea, a national college for future schoolmasters, remaining until his retirement in 1877.  ↩︎
6. Adelman, Cambridge Ecclesiologists, 127.  ↩︎
7. The scholarship’s thousand-pound endowment resulted from an 1848 benefit performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Arthur Lawrence, Sir Arthur Sullivan (London: James Bowden, 1899), 14–15.  ↩︎
8. Eva Tyson, “Remembering Edvard Grieg in Leipzig,” Grieg Society of Scotland, July 5, 2018, https://griegsocietyscotland.org/remembering-edvard-grieg-in-leipzig.  ↩︎
9. Erik Routley, “Arthur Seymour Sullivan,” Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2, no. 7 (July 1949): 103–8.  ↩︎
10. Ian C. Bradley, Arthur Sullivan: A Life of Divine Emollient (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 49.  ↩︎
11. Sullivan and Grove became close friends, travelling to Vienna in 1867 in search of lost Schubert manuscripts, discovering his Symphony in C minor (“Tragic”) and other works. Grove regularly used his influence to schedule Sullivan’s music. He also introduced Sullivan to Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Victoria’s two eldest sons, Albert—later crowned Edward VII—and Alfred, who became Sullivan’s lifelong patron.  ↩︎
12. A detailed list of Sullivan’s works is in Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan, 456–66.  ↩︎
13. Ian Bradley, Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan (London: SCM Press, 2013), 112–44.  ↩︎
14. Also in 1902, Sullivan’s hymn tunes Bishopgarth and Bolwell were sung (with new texts) at Edward VII’s Westminster Abbey coronation. In 1903, Edward’s sister Louise unveiled a Sullivan memorial statue 100 yards southeast of the Savoy Theatre, today visible at Victoria Embankment Gardens.  ↩︎
15. Although Sullivan was knighted in 1883, Gilbert was not knighted until 1907 by Edward VII.  ↩︎
16. Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 462–65; Bradley, Lost Chords, 237–38.  ↩︎
17. Anne Stanyon, “Sir Arthur Sullivan, The 1898 Leeds Festival and Beyond” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2017).  ↩︎
18. See Adelmann, The Contribution of Cambridge Ecclesiologists, esp. 63–91; Bernarr Rainbow, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Joel W. West, “The Ressourcement of Liturgical Music by John Mason Neale,” in Re-Formed Catholic Anglicanism, ed. Charles F. Camlin, Charles D. Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper (Dallas: Anglican Way Institute, 2024), 367–78.  ↩︎
19. James Dickinson, Hymns Ancient & Modern, 1861–2013: Its Rise, Development and Influence, Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper, Third Series, No. 6 (2013); J. R. Watson, “Ancient or Modern, Ancient and Modern: The Victorian Hymn and the Nineteenth Century,” Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 1–16.  ↩︎
20. Watson, “Ancient or Modern,” 1. After the success of CHWT, Baker “was indignant at what he saw as unfair competition from SPCK.” J. R Watson, The English Hymn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 398.  ↩︎
21. Ian Bradley, “The Tgeology of the Victorian Hymn Tune,” in Music and Theology in Nineteenth- Century Britain, ed. Martin V. Clarke (London: Routledge, 2016), 5–20.  ↩︎
22. Bradley, Lost Chords, 188–96.  ↩︎
23. Bradley, Arthur Sullivan, 105; Bradley, Lost Chords, 188–98.  ↩︎
24. Although hymn numbering differs, the same Sullivan tunes are found in two hymnals edited by Robert Coleman: Modern Hymnal (1926) and American Hymnal (1933), so only the former is shown in Table 1.  ↩︎
25. In the U.S., the official Episcopal Church hymnals are The Hymnal (1916), !e Hymnal (1940), and Hymnal 1982, while two unofficial hymnals from the ACNA (a breakaway Anglican group) are Magnify the Lord (2017) and Sing Unto the Lord (2023). The English hymnals are The English Hymnal (1906), Hymns Ancient & Modern – Standard Edition (1924), New English Hymnal (1986), and the Revised English Hymnal (2023).  ↩︎
26. Table 1 refers to two U.K. Hymnals (Baptist Church Hymnal, 1900; Baptist Hymn Book, 1962), one joint publication of American Baptists and Southern Baptists (New Baptist Hymnal, 1926), two American Baptist hymnals (Christian Worship, 1941; Hymnbook for Christian Worship, 1970), seven hymnals associated with or published by Southern Baptists (Kingdom Songs, 1921; Modern Hymnal, 1926; Broadman Hymnal, 1940; Baptist Hymnal, 1956; Baptist Hymnal, 1975; The Baptist Hymnal, 1991; and Baptist Hymnal, 2008) and one more recent U.S. Baptist hymnal, Celebrating Grace (2010).  ↩︎
27. Matthew Hoch, “Sacred Moments in the Secular Dramatic Works of Arthur Sullivan,” in Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Eftychia Papanikolaou and Markus Rathey (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022), 155.  ↩︎
28. Jonathan Hicks, “Whither Christian Soldiers? Metaphor and Momentum in the Mid-Twentieth Century Reception of a Victorian Hymn,” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 9, no. 1 (2024): 91.  ↩︎
29. Bradley, Lost Chords, 66; “St. Gertrude,” Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/tune/ st_gertrude_sullivan.  ↩︎
30. Alexander C. Mackenzie, “The Life-Work of Arthur Sullivan.” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 3, no. 3 (1902): 554.  ↩︎
31. Hoch, “Sacred Moments,” 162; J. W. West, “George Bush’s Houston Funeral,” December 6, 2018, https://anglicanmusic.blogspot.com/2018/12/george-bushs-houston-funeral.html.  ↩︎
32. Hicks, “Whither Christian Soldiers?” 103–23.  ↩︎
33. American hymnals use modifications to the fourth verse from A&M; J. R. Watson, “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain,” The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press, accessed December 18, 2025, http://www.hymnology.co.uk/c/come,-ye-faithful,-raise-the-strain.  ↩︎
34. The official Episcopal Church hymnal of 1892 had texts but not tunes. However, Hutchins’s unofficial musical edition includes St. Kevin and a second tune for this text. See Charles L. Hutchins, ed., The Church Hymnal Revised and Enlarged (Boston: The Parish Choir, 1896), 135– 36. Only St. Kevin was retained in the official musical edition of The Hymnal (1916).  ↩︎
35. Hutchins’s 1896 Church Hymnal recommends a tempo of 96 beats per minute, but none of the subsequent Episcopalian hymnals provide a tempo.  ↩︎
36. The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (New York: The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1940), 94 Second Tune (available online at Hymnary.org).  ↩︎
37. The same text is paired with different tunes in The English Hymnal (1906) and Magnify the Lord (2017).  ↩︎
38. Bradley, Lost Chords, 74.  ↩︎
39. The Christmas Eve hymn counts from 1997 to present are reported by David Sindon, “Carol Service Spreadsheets,” accessed February 3, 2026, https://www.sinden.org/carols/.  ↩︎
40. Bradley, Lost Chords, 77.  ↩︎
41. Baptist Church Hymnal (London: Psalms and Hymns Trust, 1900), 83 (available online at Archive.org).  ↩︎
42. Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Song, Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin & Co, 1907), 1–15.  ↩︎
43. Mervyn Horder, “A Note on St Clement,” Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland 14, no. 3 (1994): 67–68; Bradley, Lost Chords, 201–204; Chris Fenner, “The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended: St. Clement,” September 28, 2022, https://www.hymnologyarchive. com/the-day-thou-gavest-lord-is-ended.  ↩︎
44. Bradley, Lost Chords, 78.  ↩︎
45. Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 283.  ↩︎
46. Routley, Christian Hymns, 99. ↩︎
47. Stephen Downes, Music and Sentimentalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2021).  ↩︎
48. David Martin, “Music and the Aesthetic in Worship and Collective Singing: England since 1840,” Society 53, no. 6 (2016): 647–55.  ↩︎
49. Meirion Hughes and R. A. Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd. ed. (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2001).  ↩︎
50. Stanyon, “Sir Arthur Sullivan,” 22–32; Bradley, Arthur Sullivan, 5–11.  ↩︎
51. Joseph Harper, “Towards an Understanding of Tractarian Hymnody” (PhD diss., Durham University, 2010), iv.  ↩︎
52. The English Hymnal with Tunes (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), x.  ↩︎
53. The English Hymnal, xi.  ↩︎
54. Routley, “Arthur Seymour Sullivan,” 104; Routley, Christian Hymns, 104.  ↩︎
55. The 1924 edition of A&M retained only one of the seven Sullivan tunes from 1875, and added St. Gertrude for “Onward, Christian soldiers.”  ↩︎
56. Bradley, Lost Chords; Bradley, Arthur Sullivan; Benedict Taylor, Arthur Sullivan: a Musical Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2017).  ↩︎
57. Bradley, Arthur Sullivan, 202–203.  ↩︎