Christmas Eve, already.
On this date in 1818, the Christmas carol “Silent Night” was first sung at St. Nicholas Church in Obendorf, Austria. The words were from a poem, “Stille Nacht,” written by a young Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s said that Mohr was inspired in part by a walk he took, on which he was impressed by the quiet, wintry aspect of his town at peace.
He handed the words off to the church’s choir director, Franz Xaver Gruber, who wrote the melody with a deadline looming for that evening’s mass. The carol was introduced on Christmas Eve, its creators singing it in duet, with Mohr on the guitar. (St. Nicholas Church was prone to flooding, which may have damaged the organ. Eventually, the church would be replaced by Silent Night Chapel.)
An organ builder and repairman heard the carol and took it with him back to his own village, where it was picked up by two separate families of traveling folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers. The Rainers performed it before the King of Prussia and Tsar Alexander I and sang it for the first time in the United States, where they introduced it at the Alexander Hamilton Monument outside Trinity Church in New York City.
Nearly two centuries before social media, the carol went viral. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t know it. It’s been recorded over 137,000 times, for the first time back in 1905.
Even given the irresistibly Romantic story of a priest introducing the carol to his congregation on a guitar on Christmas Eve, there had been speculation over the years attributing its creation to starrier names. It was only in 1994 that the original manuscript was discovered in Mohr’s hand. Scholars now believe that two years elapsed between the actual writing of the poem in 1816 and Gruber’s last-minute contribution of the indelible melody.
If this is true, it does nothing to take away from the carol’s magic, and the rare alchemy between poet and composer.
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Stained glass from Silent Night Chapel, reinforcing the legend of Gruber (as opposed to Mohr) on the guitar
