Silent Night: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Christmas Carol (History Guy)

This is Our American Stories. Our next story comes to us from a man who’s simply known as the History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories. From its humble beginnings at an Austrian chapel in 1818, Silent Night has become one of the most popular Christmas hymns in the world. Here’s the History Guy with the story of Silent Night.

Josephus Franciscus Moore was born in the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg December 11th, 1792, the son of an embroiderer and a mercenary soldier who abandoned the family before Joseph was born. Born into poverty, a vicar at Salzburg Cathedral saw to his education, and in him, in music, where he became a singer and a violinist. In 1811 Joseph joined the seminary, and in 1815 he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. In 1816 he was serving as assistant priest in the small town of Mariapfarr, south of Salzburg, where he penned a short six-stanza poem. There is no record of him ever explaining what inspired that poem exactly, but it might have been the beautiful still countryside around mountainous Mariapfarr, and the fourth stanza that might have been referring to the difficult period of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1818, two years later, that poem was set to music and played at Midnight Mass on Christmas in the church of Saint Nicholas in the small town of Oberndorf, north of Salzburg. Today, that song is one of the world’s most popular songs. It has been translated into hundreds of languages. It is sung by millions of people. Just one recording of that song has sold more than 30 million copies and is the third-highest selling musical single in history. The musical streaming service Spotify has more than 26,000 versions of that song. The story of this poem, written by a humble priest that began in German, ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ (‘Silent Night, Holy Night’), is one shrouded in legend and largely unknown to the millions of people who enjoy the world’s most popular Christmas carol. There are records of Christmas hymns sung in Latin in 4th-century Rome, and the practice itself may predate Christianity, being adapted from pagan traditions, but these early songs weren’t popular with the public, and in the early Church, Christmas was a minor holiday. The regular singing of Christmas hymns at Christmas Midnight Mass is often credited to Saint Francis of Assisi in the 13th century, and Francis’s insistence that the songs be sung in native languages rather than Latin helped to popularize the tradition. The period of the life of Father Moore had been one of almost constant conflict in Europe. Salzburg had been occupied by the French during the War of the Second Coalition, the last of the French Revolutionary Wars. In 1805, the former Prince-Bishopric was split between the Austrian Empire and Bavaria in the Treaty of Pressburg during the Napoleonic Wars. Then in 1809, Salzburg was ceded to Bavaria after Napoleon Bonaparte defeated Archduke Charles of Austria in the Battle of Agram, ending the War of the Fifth Coalition. The territory was again divided between Austria and Bavaria in the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Napoleonic Wars. It is in this context that the fifth stanza of his poem finds its meaning. ‘Long we hoped that he might, as our Lord, free us of wrath, since times of our fathers he hath promised to spare all mankind.’ In 1817, Father Moore became an assistant priest in the town of Oberndorf, eleven miles north of Salzburg. On Christmas Eve 1818, Father Moore visited his friend Franz Xaver Gruber, who was the church choirmaster and organist. In addition to being the choirmaster for the church in Oberndorf, Franz Gruber was a teacher and the church caretaker and organist for the town of Arnsdorf, about three miles away. Gruber was a composer, and Moore hoped that he could write music to accompany the poem he had written two years earlier, so that he could sing it at Christmas Mass just a few hours away. Gruber composed the melody in just a few hours. Gruber and Moore first sang the song ‘Stille Nacht’ in the appropriately named Saint Nicholas Church in Oberndorf for Midnight Mass, Christmas of 1818. For accompaniment, Moore played the guitar and the choir repeated the last two stanzas of each verse. There has long been a legend that the church organ was broken. Some say because of rust, and others say because of a damage done by a hungry mouse. But the fact is there is no actual record that the organ was broken, and neither Moore nor Gruber ever explained why the melody was accompanied by guitar and not the organ. It might be that Father Moore simply enjoyed the guitar. By the 1830s, it had become a popular folk song throughout Austria and was popular sung by two families of folk singers, the Strausser family and the Rainer family, who became the first to sing the song in the United States in New York in 1839. It was published in a compendium of Tyrolean folk songs in the 1830s, and by the 1840s, the song had been popularized by the Royal Cathedral Choir in Berlin and was a favorite song of King Frederick William IV of Prussia. In 1859, an episcopal priest in New York City translated the song into English. While the lyrics were not an exact translation, they preserved the spirit of the song. It was then carried by Christian missionaries worldwide. In one of the more extraordinary moments in history, German soldiers began singing ‘Stille Nacht’ from the trenches on Christmas Eve of 1914. The song was very popular in Germany but still not well known in Britain, and it was the first time that many British soldiers listening from their nearby trenches had heard it, too. The British soldiers responded with a carol of their own, and that started the extra ky event called the Christmas Truce. While the circumstances of the Christmas Truce during the First World War in 1914 have sometimes been overstated, as many as 100,000 soldiers were thought to have taken part in the brief moment of fellowship and rebellion against authority. Laying down their arms, shaking hands with their enemy, and exchanging gifts. Some soldiers used the opportunity to retrieve the bodies of the fallen that had been abandoned in no man’s land. Bing Crosby released the song as a single in 1935. Since then, that single has sold more than 30 million copies, making it the third-highest selling single of all time, behind Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind,’ and Crosby’s own ‘White Christmas’. A devout Catholic, Crosby thought that it would be wrong to profit from a religious song. All the royalties from the third best selling song in history have gone to charity. Other versions have been produced by vocalist’s diverses: Elvis Presley, Gene Autry, and Justin Bieber. In 2010, music licensing company PPL determined that Silent Night was Britain’s most recorded Christmas song of all time. A similar analysis by Time magazine in 2014 of all Christmas albums recorded in the United States since 1978 determined that Silent Night was America’s most popular Christmas recording, with 733 copyrighted recordings since 1978. If you listened to a different one of the more than 26,000 versions of the song on Spotify every night, you go more than 79 years before having to repeat a version. The song was published for decades without providing any credit. For many years, people thought that it was a composition of either Beethoven or Bach. Even when Franz Gruber was finally recognized for providing the melody, the contribution of Yosef Moore of the lyrics was forgotten. The question was finally settled in 1994 when an original copy in Yosef Moore’s hand and including the original score for guitar and dated 1820, was finally authenticated. Father Moore served in many parishes and all his life donated most of his salary to charity. The man who wrote one of the world’s most popular songs died a pauper, leaving nothing behind but a ragged cassock in a lifetime of good works. Franz Gruber wrote several different variations on the melody and donated all of the proceeds to charity. He was recognized as a composer for composing more than ninety songs, but ‘Still Not’ was by far his most popular. The Church of Saint Nicholas had to be demolished as the entire town of Oberndorf was moved upstream due to repeated flooding, but there is a small chapel on the site of the original church that is dedicated to the song Silent Night, and next to it is a museum that commemorates the lives of Father Moore, on Franz Gruber and local history. Franz Gruber’s home in the Austrian town of Hallein has been preserved as a museum and included in its displays is Joseph Moore’s guitar, used to play the song for the first time in 1818, and it is still the song’s humble origins that are perhaps the most compelling part of the story of the world’s most popular Christmas Carol. I’m the History Guy, wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas.

And a great job as always to Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to the History Guy for all that he does for everybody telling these stories about life as it was, and my goodness, what contours! I mean. The man who writes the song is a priest who dies with nothing. Everyone associated with this song just couldn’t take the earnings. Bing Crosby didn’t. A devout Catholic, he donated them away. The composer couldn’t. He donated them away. When you’re around something sacred, no matter what your beliefs, sometimes it’s hard to make a dollar. The story of Silent Night here on Our American Stories. So sport, it’s so much sa.