Silent Night

“Silent Night” began as a poem, “Stille Nacht,” written in 1816 by Joseph Mohr, a young assistant priest in the Austrian village of Mariapfarr. Two years later Mohr was serving at the church of St. Nicholas in Oberndorf, on the Salzach river near Salzburg, and he asked Franz Xaver Gruber, the schoolmaster and organist in nearby Arnsdorf, to give it a melody and a guitar accompaniment for the Christmas Eve Mass. The carol was first sung there on December 24, 1818. The English words most people sing were published in 1859 by John Freeman Young, an Episcopal priest at Trinity Church in New York who later became Bishop of Florida; he translated three of Mohr’s six verses. The earliest recording SecondHandSongs lists is the Edison Male Quartette’s, from August 1905.