A priest’s poem and a guitar on Christmas Eve 1818: the story of “Silent Night”
On Christmas Eve 1818, in the small Austrian town of Oberndorf, a young priest and a schoolteacher stood before their congregation and sang a new song. One played the guitar. It was “Stille Nacht”, “Silent Night”.
The words had been written by Joseph Mohr, an assistant priest, as a poem in 1816, when he was serving in another village. In 1818, he asked Franz Xaver Gruber, the organist and schoolteacher in the neighbouring village of Arnsdorf, to compose a melody for two voices, choir and guitar.
Why a guitar?
A popular story says the church organ was broken, perhaps damaged by mice or flooding, so a guitar had to be used. Historians are not certain about the broken organ, but Mohr did ask for guitar accompaniment, and the first performance was sung with guitar at Midnight Mass at St Nicholas Church.
A troubled time
The song was written in a period of hardship. Europe was recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, and 1816 had been the “year without a summer”, when volcanic ash from Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused crop failures. The song’s message of calm and peace spoke to people who had known little of either.
How it spread
An organ builder who came to repair the Oberndorf organ took the song back to his region. Travelling families of folk singers from the Ziller Valley performed it across Europe. It was published in the 1830s and spread widely. It was translated into English in the nineteenth century, and the familiar English version, “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright”, was made by John Freeman Young.
The Christmas truce
During the Christmas truce of 1914 in the First World War, soldiers on both sides of the trenches on the Western Front sang carols, and “Stille Nacht” was among the songs reported. It became a symbol of shared humanity across enemy lines.
UNESCO
In 2011, Austria listed “Silent Night” as part of its intangible cultural heritage. The song has been translated into hundreds of languages and dialects.
In Ghana and Nigeria
The carol is sung in churches across West Africa, in English and local languages, often by candlelight at carol services in December.
The first performance used one guitar and two voices in a village church. Two centuries later, it is sung by millions on the same night every year.
