It has long been debated who composed the music to the song. It was originally credited to Johann Hartmann, the same composer who wrote the score for the original play Fiskerne, where the lyrics had first appeared.

Another suggestion was that a friend of Johannes Ewald, High Court judge Ditlev Ludvig Rogert, who was known to have played the violin, had been the original composer – a claim that was backed up by several 19th-century intellectuals. In 1880, Vilhelm Carl Ravn presented his theory that the score significantly preceded Ewald's poem and had no one particular composer. This is the most commonly supported theory today.

However, even today the score is also often wrongly credited to Friedrich Kuhlau, who made "King Christian" a popular anthem by using his own arrangement of the score in his play Elverhøj,[6] which premiered at the wedding between Crown Prince Frederik (the later King Frederik VII) and Princess Vilhelmine in November 1828.