Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
‘Round yon virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild…
The song, with its lullaby-like melody and simple message of calm and peace, turns 200 this year – yet in these turbulent times – its sentiment is just as relevant today as it was when it was sung in that small Salzburg church in Austria two centuries ago.
Let’s go back to 1816. The Napoleonic War had just ended. Financial ruin and insecurity were everywhere – further stoked by floods, fires, and widespread famine. It was the “year without a summer” in the Northern Hemisphere.
That year, Joseph Mohr, an assistant priest in Mariapfarr, the hometown of his father in the Salzburg Lungau region, which had just come under Austrian rule, wrote a poem called “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” to commemorate the coming of peace. By 1818, Father Mohr had come to Oberndorf.
The first singing of Silent Night
In the winter of 1818, according to CNN’s John Malathronas, when the river Salzbach flooded into Mohr’s parish church of Saint Nicholas, Father Mohr was concerned that his parishioners have music on Christmas Eve, so he asked church organist Franz Xaver Gruber from the neighboring village of Arndorf to set his poem to music to be sung by two voices and a guitar.
It did not take the church organist too long to set the poem to music, completing his task that very afternoon. Because the guitar was not an instrument approved of by the church, Mohr and Gruber waited until the end of the Christmas Mass to introduce their song.
Mohr sang tenor and strummed the guitar while Gruber sang bass, with the congregation coming in on the chorus. Gruber so loved the song, he brought it back to his home in Zillertal. From there, two traveling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows.
Silent Night made it across the pond in 1839, making its American debut at New York’s Trinity Church. Years later, during World War I, on Christmas Eve 1914 English troops recognized the tune being sung in German by enemy troops. For a brief moment in time, both sides put down their weapons, and celebrated the holiday together in what history remembers as “the Christmas Truce.”
Silent Night in today’s world
Silent Night has been translated into over 300 languages. In Oberndorf and other villages in the province of Salzburg, the song can only be sung on Christmas Eve because if it’s performed at other times, Bavarian children are told, someone will die, according to CBC Canada News.
But one of the big thrills for travelers to Oberndorf during the Christmas holiday is being at the Silent Night Chapel, along with thousands of other people from around the world, everyone singing the carol in their own language. In 2011 Silent Night was added to the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
The story as this writer has described it is as close to being historically correct as possible. And it is history that tells us of the popularity in this simple lullaby of peace. Peace, to all the world, is what Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of religious studies at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa says the song is all about,
Forbes said, “It expresses the longing, I think, for peace in our lives. That’s powerful.” Yes, peace is powerful.
