Christmas - 'Silent Night' - Austria's 'Stille Nacht'

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Christmas graphics on this page courtesy Brigitte Haag

Austria’s “Stille Nacht”

A Christmas Carol Goes Around the World

The world’s most famous Christmas song, “Silent Night,” comes to us from Austria (Österreich in German). Called “Stille Nacht” in its original German, this beautiful Christmas carol is now sung and enjoyed around the world in hundreds of languages.

My thanks to “Silent Night” historian Bill Egan for his information and assistance. All photos on this page (except for the Stille-Nacht-Kapelle) courtesy Bill Egan and are used with his permission.

The first performance of Stille Nacht” featured
guitar accompaniment.

But the familiar melody we recognize today as “Silent Night” or “Stille Nacht” is not quite the same one that Franz Gruber composed, and although the song was not truly “lost” or “forgotten” — as legend would have it — the world-famous carol did take many years to become as well known and as ubiquitous as it is today. In the intervening years Joseph Mohr is known to have written a “Stille Nacht” arrangement around 1820, and new hand-written arrangements by Franz Gruber appeared before his death — one for a full orchestra in 1845, and another for organ in 1855. By 1900 “Stille Nacht” had made its way around the entire globe. But we should start at the beginning.

German Christmas Carols
Lyrics in German and English! - from AboutGerman.net

Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) composed the music for “Stille Nacht.”

On a cold Christmas Eve in 1818 pastor Joseph Franz Mohr (1792-1848) walked the three kilometers from his home in the Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg to visit his friend Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) in the neighboring town of Arnsdorf bei Laufen. Mohr brought with him a poem he had written some two years earlier. He desperately needed a carol for the Christmas Eve midnight mass that was only hours away. He hoped his friend, a school teacher who also served as the church's choir master and organist, could set his poem to music. And one of the many amazing things about this carol is that Franz Gruber composed the “Stille Nacht” melody for Mohr in just a few hours on that December 24, 1818.

Joseph Franz Mohr (1792-1848) wrote the words for “Stille Nacht.”

Recent flooding of the nearby Salzach river had put the church organ out of commission, so Gruber composed the music for guitar accompaniment. (The guitar pictured at the top of this page is thought to be the one Joseph Mohr played in 1818.) A few hours after Gruber finished his composition, he and Mohr stood before the altar of the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf to perform their own work. A local choir group backed them up as the sounds of the brand new carol broke the silence of that “Stille Nacht.”

Historical photo of the Nicola-Kirche (St. Nicholas Church) in Oberndorf, Austria, site of the premiere performance of "Stille Nacht" in 1818. Because flooding had damaged its foundation, the church was demolished in the early 1900s. The river in this photo, the Salzach (which also flows through nearby Salzburg), has a tendency to flood. For this reason, the entire town of Oberndorf was relocated to a less flood-prone location some 800 meters upstream in the 1920s or 1930s. Around the same time, a new parish church was constructed, and a small memorial chapel, the Stille-Nacht-Gedächtniskapelle, replaced the original Nicola-Kirche. (See a photo of one of the stained-glass windows in the chapel depicting “Vikar Josef Mohr” and the former church.)

For many years in the later half of the 19th century, when the carol was beginning to become more popular, people who knew anything about “Stille Nacht” assumed the melody must have been composed by a more famous composer, possibly Beethoven, Haydn, or even Mozart. Although Gruber had made a written claim as the composer prior to his death in 1863, doubts lingered on into the 20th century. The question was officially settled only several years ago when an arrangement of “Stille Nacht” in Joseph Mohr’s hand was authenticated. In the upper right hand corner of the arrangement Mohr had written the words, “Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber.”

Around 1832, when Gruber’s melody was performed by folk singers from Austria’s Ziller Valley... (Continued, the song...)

NEXT > The “Silent Night” Story - Part 2

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