Source: Good News Network
200 years ago today, the Christmas carol Silent Night (Stille Nacht) was composed in a few hours and performed in a little church in Austria. The parish priest Joseph Mohr, himself a violinist and singer, wrote the lyrics some two years earlier. He wanted to use it for Midnight Mass, so he walked three kilometers from his home in Oberndorf bei Salzburg to visit his friend Franz Xaver Gruber.
In only a few hours, Gruber, a school teacher who also served as the church’s choir master and organist, set his poem to music. The simple song was sung that evening in a simple arrangement for guitar and choir. Within a few years, arrangements of the carol spread to churches in the Salzburg Archdiocese by folk singers from the Ziller Valley who took the composition on tours around Europe—performing for audiences that included Franz I of Austria and Alexander I of Russia, and was reported to be a favorite of Frederick William IV of Prussia… (1818)Over the years, because the original manuscript had been lost, Mohr’s name was forgotten and although Gruber was known to be the…
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