It was the afternoon of a cold Christmas Eve in 1818, and Joseph Framz Mohr trudged through the snow from his home in Oberndorf bei Salzburg in the Austrian Tyrol to visit his friend Franz Xavier Grüber, a schoolmaster in the neighbouring town of Amsdorf bei Laufen. Mohr was the pastor of the village church and Crüger the organist. He desperately needed a new carol for Midnight Mass and the organ was out of action due to recent floods. He took with him the words of a poem he had written two years earlier, describing the night when angels announced the birth of the long awaited Messiah to the shepherds on a hillside. later that day, the little congregation at Obendorf saw the two men standing in front of the altar in St. Nicholas’ Church singing “Stille Nacht! Heilege Nacht!” fir the first time, accompanied simply by a guitar, and backed by the choir, who simply repeated the last two lines of each verse.

Some time later - it is not known exactly when, Karl Maurecher, an organ builder who lived in the Ziller valley, arrived at the church to repair the organ and obtained a copy of the words and music of the carol, which he passed on to two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers

These two families were something like the Trapp family, who were featured in The Sound of Music, and one of the Rainers’ performances was heard by The Emperor Franz Joseph and Tsar Alexander, and the carol soon became a favourite of King Frederick William IV or Prussia, and was sung every year at the Cathedral in Berlin. In 1833 it was published in Dresden and Leipzig as one of “Four Tyrolean Songs.”

In 1839 the Rainers took the tune to America, where it was heard for the first time at the Alexander Hamilton Monument outside Trinity Church in New York City, and shortly afterwards the first of many English translations appeared. The definitive English version was the work of Rev John Freeman Young, who in 1859 issued a 16-page pamphlet called carols for Christmas Tide, beginning “Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright.” He later became Bishop of Florida.

Meanwhile, in 1854, at the request of the Royal Court Chapel in Berlin and the monastery of St. Peter at Salzburg, an investigation was launched into the apparently unknown origins of the carol. Mohr had died penniless in 1848, but Grüber, a relatively unknown provincial organist, wrote claiming that it was his, though many could not believe that such a melody was not the work of Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert. Proof finally appeared in 1995, when a early copy in Mohr’s own hand was authenticated, inscribed “Melodie von Fr. Xav. Grüber” This is probably the closest to the original that we have, and has been used for reconstructing authentic editions in recent years. At the beginning of the last century the town of Oberndorf was relocated due to the constant flooding of the Salzach river. The original church of St Nicholas closed in 1903 and was demolished, a new one opening the following year. A tiny memorial Chapel was built on the site of the site of the original chapel and dedicated in 1937, a monument to the miracle of Silent Night, which, in 300 different languages, has entered the hearts of people everywhere.

Tom Muckley, December 2007

This article was originally published by the Petersfield Post

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