WASHINGTON — On Christmas Eve in 1818, two men with a small guitar entered a church in Oberndorf, Austria, and prepared to sing a new Christmas carol.
Times had been bad in Oberndorf, where many people worked on the water, manning the salt barges that plied the Salzach River. The upheaval in central Europe caused by the Napoleonic Wars had just ended.
And only two years before, the dreadfully dark summer of 1816 — later blamed on ash from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia — had caused famine and deprivation.
But in that fall of 1816, a young Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr, had written a six-verse Christmas poem that began “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” — Silent Night, Holy Night — about the Nativity of a curly haired Jesus.
Two years later, Father Mohr enlisted a friend, Franz Xaver Gruber, a local schoolteacher and musician, to come up with a melody for the poem that could be played for Christmas on the guitar. (Legend has it that the church organ had been damaged by mice or water and was on the blink.)
Gruber’s composition is thought to have taken about a day.
Now, as the two men put the words to music that Thursday 200 years ago in Oberndorf’s St. Nicholas Church, they voiced for the first time what is probably history’s most enduring and beloved Christmas carol.
“It’s such a part of the general soundscape of Christmas,” said Sarah Eyerly, assistant professor of musicology and director of the early music program at Florida State University’s College of Music.
“Oftentimes when songs are composed by people in times of great stress, there’s something quite human about them,” she said. “And that often resonates with people outside of that particular geographic location, or culture or time period.”
Since 1818, “Silent Night” has been translated from German into hundreds of languages. There are about a dozen different translations just in English, with an 1850s version the most widely accepted, Eyerly said.
The carol has spawned TV shows, a cartoon, a documentary. On the Western Front in 1914, during World War I, it was sung during the spontaneous “Christmas Truce” between allied and German soldiers who had been slaughtering each other hours before.
It’s been performed by rap musicians, Bing Crosby and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
There are gospel and heavy metal versions.
Yet it is the intimacy of the words, the scene and the music for the small parlor guitar that has soothed listeners for two centuries.
“Mohr was a guitarist,” Eyerly said. “Guitar is a much more approachable folk instrument than an organ, and for a song in this style … it would be much more common to play it on a plucked string instrument like a guitar.”
The carol spread quickly across Europe. It was bought to the United States, where, some accounts say, it was first performed on Christmas Day 1839, in the churchyard of New York’s Trinity Church, Wall Street, by a troupe of traveling Austrians, the Ranier Singers.
The carol was translated into English in the 1850s by an Episcopal priest at Trinity, John Freeman Young. He published it in a book of Christmas carols in 1859. He translated the first, third and sixth verses, and did a fairly good job, given the literal German of the song.
