Looking Out 24.12.2023

THE STORY BEHIND ‘SILENT NIGHT’

The Story goes that Silent Night – originally ‘Stille Nacht’ – was first performed on the evening of Christmas Eve 1818. Joseph Mohr, a young catholic priest at St Nicholas Church, Obendorf bei Sultzburg in Austria, was in despair: the organ at his church had been incapacitated by mice, and

the chances of fixing the instrument before the evening service were looking slim. But the young Joseph had an idea. A few years before, he had written a beautiful poem called ‘Stille Nacht’. So, he asked Franz Xavez Gruber, a schoolmaster and organist in a nearby town, to set his 6-stanza poem to music. That night, the two men sang ‘Stille Nacht’ for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, while Mohr played guitar and the choir repeated the last two lines of each verse. Good thing they didn’t call an engineer. The rest – as they say – is history.

Maddy Shaw Roberts