OBERNDORF, AUSTRIA Among the most beloved and universal of all Christmas carols is Silent Night. The beloved seasonal song was first performed on Christmas Eve in a tiny Austrian church 200 years ago. For Chirstmas 2018 it is still the song that represents the story of Christ’s birth.
The story of Silent Night
Oberndorf bei Salzburg as it is officially known, is situated approximately 11 miles north of Salzburg. It is on the shores of the Salzach River. Its sister village of Laufen in Bavaria, Germany lies across the Salzach Bridge. In 1818, a small troupe of actors was performing in villages throughout the Austrian Alps. The troop came to the town of Oberndorf on December 23rd.
The town had been divided in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars when the onetime Principality of the Salzburg Archbishops was split in 1816 after the Congress of Vienna.
In the same year, a young priest, Father Joseph Mohr, wrote a poem entitled Stille Nacht while living in Mariafarr, the hometown of his father.
Father Joseph Mohr’s Stille Nacht
A year later, Mohr moved to Oberndorf in 1817.
In 1818, the acting group was scheduled to re-enact the story of Christ’s birth at the little Church of St. Nicholas, but the organ was not working and could not be repaired before Christmas.
Some say the organ was broken due to mice but other versions claim that rust had caused the problem.
Without the availability of an organ, the actors performed their program from the first chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament. The Reverend Mohr was at that show. Father Mohr was so impressed by the performance that he decided to take the long way home in order to meditate about the season and what he had just witnessed.
Father Mohr’s meditation put to song
Mohr’s walk took him over the crest of a small hill overlooking Oberndorf from which he could see a glistening snow-covered panorama shimmering in the moonlight beneath the stars. Reveling in the thoughts of the program and the serenity of the cold wintry night, the pastor peered down at the Christmas-card setting and recalled the poem he had written just one year before.
Mohr’s poem told the story of the night when angels proclaimed the birth of the Messiah to shepherds tending their flocks on a hillside.
As he gazed upon the village, something in his heart told Reverend Mohr that his poem might make a good carol for the Christmas Eve service the next night. The problem, of course, was that there was no music to which the poem could be sung.
The next day, Mohr went to visit the church organist, Franz Xaver Gruber. Mohr asking the composer a melody which could be sung with a guitar. With just a few hours to create his masterpiece, Gruber composed a tune that could be sung without the need of an organ.
And so, as circumstance would have it, the Christmas carol Silent Night was born because the church where it began had no organ.
The first playing of Silent Night two-hundred years ago today
The Oberndorf congregation heard the carol for the first time on Christmas Eve 1818. Mohr and Gruber sang the words accompanied by Gruber’s guitar.
Several weeks later, the well-known organ builder, Karl Mauracher, arrived in Oberndorf to repair the broken instrument. Upon completion, to make certain it had been fixed satisfactorily, Mauracher told Gruber to test the organ before he departed. Gruber sat down at the keyboard and began to play his simple but elegant new Christmas carol.
Mauracher was overwhelmed by the music. He made copies and took them back to his own village of Kapfing . In Kapfing two well-known family singing groups, the Rainers and the Strassers, heard the carol for the first time.
Both families were captivated incorporating the song into their Christmas repertoire.
Spreading the story and song of Silent Night
The Strasser sisters spread the carol throughout northern Europe. In 1834, when King Frederick William of Prussia heard it for the first time, he ordered its singing every Christmas Eve.
By 1838, the Rainer family brought the song to the United States. The group preforming German at the Alexander Hamilton Monument outside of New York’s Trinity Church.
Nearly 50 years after it was written, Silent Night was translated into English. Today the song has more than 200 versions and has been translated into hundreds of languages.
Perhaps most meaningful of all its history, however, came during the Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I. It was then that Silent Night was sung simultaneously in French, English and German by the troops on the front lines. And the reason – because it was the one carol that all the soldiers on both sides of the battlefield knew.
“Silent night, Holy night, All is calm, All is bright.”
These are words that transcend time, space and cultural differences for they truly universal. Wishing you a Merry Christmas 2018.
(Reprinted and updated from December 22, 2014)
About the Author:
Bob Taylor is a veteran writer who has traveled throughout the world. Taylor is an award winning television producer/reporter/anchor before focusing on writing about international events, people and cultures around the globe.
Taylor is a founder of The Magellan Travel Club (www.MagellanTravelClub.com)
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