Hymnen was first performed in collaboration with the Electronic Music Studio of the broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, in a version with soloists on 30 November 1967.

[1] The soloists were Aloys Kontarsky, piano, Johannes G. Fritsch, viola, Harald Bojé [de], electronium, and Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson, percussion.

He had collected 137 anthems, of which only 40 are used in the four extant parts,[14] and had organised materials for two further regions, according to contemporary reports:[15][16] Stockhausen's original vision for the piece was also much freer.

[18] Stockhausen also withdrew the soloist version of Hymnen after receiving recordings of it from ensembles that displayed "arbitrary confusion and unembarrassed lack of taste".

[22] Robin Maconie, on the contrary, regards any apparent political message as superficial, with less significance for younger audiences than for listeners who remember the student uprisings, Viet Nam, and other issues of mass protest from the time when Hymnen was composed, holding that the musical meaning of Stockhausen's chosen material is not what those sounds might represent, but what they are acoustically.

[14] Johannes Fritsch calls Hymnen a "masterpiece", comparable to Beethoven's Missa solemnis, Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.

These ways of hearing include the discovery of highly accelerated events in the midst of very slow ones, or elements of stasis in a context of extreme turbulence; sometimes the anthems are only glimpsed, or become hidden, are overlaid, or broken into fragments and recombined.

The result can be interpreted as "a magisterial response from the German musical and intellectual tradition to a US cold war agenda of speech recognition and translation", that at the same time "comprehensively addresses the same underlying issues of melody synthesis by interpolation and substitution programming".

[24] The New York Times included Hymnen in their 2011 history of the mashup, due it being composed "by mixing national anthems with tape manipulation and signal processing.