DAVID ADAMS takes a look at where it all started for one of the world’s most popular carols…
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PICTURE: Roger Ashford/www.istockphoto.com |
It’s one of the world’s most popular Christmas carols but it owes it’s origins to a priest’s poem.
Silent Night‘s beginnings go back to 1816 – only a year after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – when Catholic priest, Josef Mohr, wrote a six-stanza poem while serving at a pilgrim church in Mariapfarr, Austria.
Two years later, in 1818, he was assigned as assistant priest at the parish church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, and asked organist and school teacher Franz Gruber to write some music for it – the Silent Night Association says that Gruber described it in his account of the song’s creation as “a fitting melody for two solo voices together with choir and for accompaniment by guitar”.
There’s a story that he did so after the organ at the church broke down and, that, with it unable to repaired before the Christmas Eve service, Mohr asked Gruber to write the music so it could be sung with only a guitar as accompaniment. But, according to the BBC and others, this story is merely a legend – in fact, the BBC says it was invented in the US in the 1930s.
The song – Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht – entered the English language after New York-based Episcopalian priest, John Freeman Young, translated it from German in 1859 (Young was later a bishop in Florida).
It’s since been translated into more than 140 languages and every year is sung by millions around the world. In 2011 was declared part of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.
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