Free Christmas piano sheet music
59 carols and Christmas classics for piano, free to read, hear and print. Easiest first.
Open the sheet music libraryEvery carol people actually sing at Christmas, set for piano, and the Christmas music of the concert hall beside them: Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Bach's chorale preludes, Handel's Messiah. One version of each, chosen to be the plainest good setting, so the tune is on top where you can find it.
All of it is out of copyright, so there is nothing to buy and no email to give. Open a carol and it plays back at any speed, loops the bar that keeps tripping you, and prints cleanly for the piano at a family gathering. The list runs from the gentlest reading to the fullest arrangements.
About the pieces
We Three Kings
Written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins, a clergyman in New York, for a Christmas pageant; the words and the tune are both his.
Good King Wenceslas
John Mason Neale wrote the words in 1853 about a real tenth-century Duke of Bohemia. He borrowed the tune from Piae Cantiones, a Finnish songbook of 1582, where it was a carol about spring.
Deck the Halls
The tune is Welsh, Nos Galan, a New Year's Eve song written down in the eighteenth century. The English words, with their fa la la, are Thomas Oliphant's, from 1862.
Greensleeves
An English ballad registered in London in 1580. The story that Henry VIII wrote it is a legend; he had been dead for over thirty years.
The First Nowell
A carol from Cornwall, first printed in the 1820s and 1830s in the collections of Davies Gilbert and William Sandys. The harmony most choirs sing was added by John Stainer in 1871.
Angels We Have Heard on High
A French carol, Les anges dans nos campagnes, sung for generations before it was printed; the English words are James Chadwick's, from 1862. Everyone knows it by its Gloria, a long, tumbling run of notes on a single syllable.
Silent Night
Written for Christmas Eve 1818 in the village church of Oberndorf, near Salzburg. The young priest Joseph Mohr had written the words two years before; that day he asked the schoolteacher Franz Xaver Gruber for a tune, and they sang it together with a guitar.
The Sussex Carol
On Christmas night all Christians sing: the words were printed by an Irish bishop, Luke Wadding, in 1684. The tune was collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1904 from Harriet Verrall of Monk's Gate, in Sussex, who sang it to him.
Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming
Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, a German carol first printed in 1599. The harmony choirs sing is Michael Praetorius's, from 1609.
Away in a Manger
The words first appeared in Philadelphia in 1885, and for years they were credited to Martin Luther, who had nothing to do with them. The carol is sung to two tunes: William Kirkpatrick's Cradle Song in Britain, and James Murray's in America.
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
One of the oldest carols still sung, printed on London street sheets in the eighteenth century and sung long before. The comma belongs after merry: God rest you merry means God keep you happy.
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Phillips Brooks, a Philadelphia rector, wrote the words after riding out to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1865. His organist Lewis Redner wrote the American tune for the Sunday school's Christmas in 1868; in England the words are sung to Forest Green, a folk tune Vaughan Williams collected.
Once in Royal David's City
Cecil Frances Alexander wrote the words in 1848 in a book of hymns for children; Henry Gauntlett's tune followed a year later. Since 1919 the Christmas Eve service at King's College, Cambridge, has opened with a single boy singing the first verse alone.
Coventry Carol
A lullaby from the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, a mystery play acted in the streets of Coventry in the sixteenth century. It is sung by the mothers of Bethlehem, which makes it the saddest carol there is.
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Charles Wesley's words from 1739, sung to a tune Mendelssohn wrote in 1840 for a festival celebrating Gutenberg and the printing press. Mendelssohn said it would never do for sacred words; in 1855 the organist William Cummings fitted it to Wesley's hymn anyway, and it stuck.
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
The words come from the medieval O antiphons, sung in the last days before Christmas, and John Mason Neale translated them in 1851. The tune was adapted by Thomas Helmore from a fifteenth-century French chant.
In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti's poem, published in 1872, and set by Gustav Holst in 1906 for the English Hymnal. Holst's tune is called Cranham, after the Cotswold village where he wrote it.
O Come, All Ye Faithful
Adeste Fideles, a Latin hymn written down in the 1740s by John Francis Wade, an English copyist of church music living in France. Frederick Oakeley's English words came a century later, in 1841.
See Amid the Winter's Snow
Edward Caswall's words from 1858; John Goss wrote the tune for them in 1871.
O Holy Night
Minuit, chrétiens: Adolphe Adam set a poem by Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant, in 1847. The English words most people sing were written by the American John Sullivan Dwight in 1855.
Angels from the Realms of Glory
James Montgomery, a Sheffield newspaper editor, printed the words in his own paper on Christmas Eve 1816. In Britain they are usually sung to the French tune of Angels We Have Heard on High; in America to Henry Smart's Regent Square.
Here We Come A-Wassailing
Wassail was the hot spiced drink carried from door to door at New Year, and the wassailers sang for their share. This carol comes from the north of England and was printed in the nineteenth century.
The Holly and the Ivy
An English folk carol whose words were printed around 1710. The tune everyone sings was collected by Cecil Sharp in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds, early in the twentieth century.
He Shall Feed His Flock
An aria from Messiah, which Handel wrote in about three weeks in 1741 and first performed in Dublin the following spring. The alto sings it first, and the soprano answers with Come unto him.
A Christmas Carol (Ring Merrily, Bells)
This Christmas carol, with its refrain "Ring merrily, bells, ding, dong!", is by Alfred Scott-Gatty, who wrote many songs for children alongside his work as an English herald.
Ding Dong Merrily on High
The tune is a French dance, printed in 1589 in Orchésographie, Thoinot Arbeau's manual of dances. George Ratcliffe Woodward wrote the English words in 1924, bells and all.
Silently Falling Snow
Silently Falling Snow is a quiet winter song from the seasonal pages of Albert E. Wier's The Child's Own Music Book, published in 1918.
Still, still, still
An Austrian lullaby carol from the Salzburg region, first printed in the 1860s. Still means quiet: hush, the child is sleeping.
Waltz of the Flowers
The Nutcracker's grandest waltz: Tchaikovsky at his most generous, giving the flowers a tune fit for the leads.
In dulci jubilo, BWV 608
Bach's Orgelbüchlein setting of the famous Christmas carol, arranged for piano from the organ original. It is a double canon: the tune is imitated between the top voice and the pedal, and the inner parts run their own canon in triplet figures at the same time.
Puer natus in Bethlehem, BWV 603
A Christmas prelude from the Orgelbüchlein on the carol 'A Child is born in Bethlehem', arranged for piano from the organ original. It is written with the older signature of one flat, so the E flats appear as accidentals, and a lilting figure in the lower parts rocks under the tune in 3/2.
Christmas Song
This began as a song with a singer, and on the piano the melody line is the voice. Grieg built a Norwegian voice out of small pieces, taking folk material and harmonising it in a way nobody had before.
December-Christmas Opus 37 No. 12
December, the last of the twelve monthly pieces a magazine commissioned from Tchaikovsky through 1876, subtitled Christmas.
Carol of the Bells
A Ukrainian new-year folk chant about a swallow, rebuilt by Leontovych into four notes that ring like struck bronze. December has not been quiet since.
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
An English carol from the West Country, where carollers went door to door and would not go until they got some figgy pudding. Arthur Warrell's arrangement of 1935 made it known everywhere.
The Twelve Days of Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas is a cumulative song, each verse adding a new gift to the list until there are twelve. Cecil Sharp printed this version, with its own tune and piano part, in One Hundred English Folksongs in 1916.
Joy to the World
The tune was assembled in 1839 by Lowell Mason, who credited Handel. Phrases in it resemble Messiah closely enough that the attribution has never quite been settled or quite gone away.
Ich steh an Deiner Krippen hier
I stand here at your manger, a Christmas chorale Bach set both as an organ prelude and as a song in the Schemelli hymn collection he helped edit.
Spanish Dance (From The Nutcracker)
From The Nutcracker, first danced in St Petersburg in December 1892. In the Land of Sweets each treat gets a dance, and the Spanish one is Chocolate: castanets, trumpets, and a quick bright bolero.
Dream About Silent Night - Nielsen CNW 85
A short piano piece Carl Nielsen wrote in 1905, a dream on Glade jul, the Danish Silent Night. The carol drifts through soft, shifting harmony, as if half remembered.
Chinese Dance - The Nutcracker Suite - Peter
From The Nutcracker, first danced in St Petersburg in December 1892. In the Land of Sweets this is Tea: in the orchestra a flute flutters high over bassoons plodding two notes in the bass.
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Written for the celesta, an instrument so new Tchaikovsky had it smuggled into Russia so no rival would hear it first. The tune is the sound of tiptoeing made music.