Silent Night: The little carol that could
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Joe Klamar, AFP/Getty Images photos
Markus Giglmayer, left, sings "Silent Night" with his brother Christian to visitors at the Silent Night Memorial Chapel in Oberndorf, Austria. Joseph Mohr wrote the lyrics in 1816, and Franz Xaver Gruber added his melody in 1818. The carol's message of peace has made it an enduring song in troubled times.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Diane Ritter knows what she'll be doing at about 8:25 this evening.
She'll be in the darkened Beulah Presbyterian Church in Churchill with about 600 other people, holding a candle, singing, her eyes brimming with tears.
And all because of a song that is celebrating its 190th anniversary this year -- "Silent Night," or, in its original tongue, "Stille Nacht."
"I love that song," said Ms. Ritter, of Harrison City. "I especially like it when there's no accompaniment and we all sing it together. The older I get, the more it touches me."
"Silent Night" is arguably the most famous Christmas carol in the world and is the song most often sung at the conclusion of Christmas Eve candlelight services, Protestant and Catholic, around the globe.
(An informal poll on www.post-gazette.com showed "O Holy Night" getting more votes than "Silent Night" as favorite carol, but more on that later.)
After a modest beginning near the Tyrolean Alps of Austria, "Silent Night" has now been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects, according to the Silent Night Association in Oberndorf, Austria.
Joseph Mohr, a 24-year-old Austrian priest who spent his entire life within 40 miles of his birthplace, wrote the original six verses of lyrics in 1816, just a year after the ruinous Napoleonic Wars had ended in Europe.
The fighting had disrupted the salt trade on which the region thrived -- the region's capital, Salzburg, means "Salt City" in English -- and many of Father Mohr's parishioners were suffering, said Manfred Fischer, scientific adviser for the Silent Night Association.
That was obviously on Father Mohr's mind when he wrote the song's fourth verse, which is almost never sung today.
"Silent Night, Holy Night," reads the association's translation of the verse, "Where on this day, all power of fatherly love poured forth, and [Jesus] like a brother lovingly embraced the peoples of the world, lovingly embraced the peoples of the world."
Two years later, Father Mohr asked his friend, organist and teacher Franz Xaver Gruber, to set his lyrics to music when Father Mohr was serving a church in Oberndorf.
Legend has it that mice had gnawed through the bellows of the church organ, forcing Mr. Gruber to play the song on the guitar. While the mouse story seems apocryphal, it is true that the first rendition of the carol, on Christmas Eve, 1818, was done on guitar, with Father Mohr and Mr. Gruber singing a duet.
The historic St. Nicholas church was torn down long ago, but a memorial chapel has been built on the site, and at 5 p.m. today -- 11 a.m. our time -- thousands of people will gather there for the annual singing of "Stille Nacht."
Hal Hopson, a noted church music composer from Plano, Texas, who has written more than 1,600 anthems and arrangements, said that for him, "Silent Night" is the perfect way to end a Christmas Eve service.
"I think hands down it's the most popular of all carols, with its simplicity," Mr. Hopson said. "Some things are simple but not so attractive, but 'Silent Night' has elegant simplicity."
"Some carol lyrics are more theological, but 'Silent Night' paints a picture, and with its compound meter, it has a kind of lullaby swing to it that is very engaging.
"But the real reason it's so perfect for candlelight services is because of its serenity."
Like many other churches, Beulah Presbyterian will end its singing of "Silent Night" with parishioners holding their candles high in the air, reflecting hundreds of points of light off the surrounding windows, said music director Michael Frank.
The stained glass window, above, at the Silent Night Memorial Chapel in Oberndorf, Austria, shows a portrait of Franz Xaver Gruber, composer of "Silent Night."
Click photo for larger image.
The original tune for the popular Christmas carol "Silent Night" was more rhythmically complex than the version we sing today. Post-Gazette reporter/singers Samantha Bennett and Rosa Colucci, accompanied by editor/guitarist Peter King, demonstrate the differences:
Original tune
The Silent Night Memorial Chapel in the Austrian village of Oberndorf stands on the original site of St. Nicholas Church where the Christmas carol "Silent Night" was heard for the first time on Christmas Eve in 1818.
Click photo for larger image.
Mr. Frank said that he personally doesn't like ending the service on such a quiet note, so after the candles are extinguished, he will turn on the lights and play "Joy to the World" to give people a rousing exit.
Others prefer not to break the "Silent Night" mood, and will end their services with its tranquil ambience.
For the first few years of its existence, "Stille Nacht" was a purely local phenomenon in Austria.
But then two well-known Austrian singing families -- the Rainers and the Strassers -- began performing it on tours of Europe, and in 1839, the Rainers arrived in New York for the beginning of a highly successful four-year American tour.
They performed the first known rendition of "Stille Nacht" in the United States on Christmas Day, 1839, in front of Trinity Episcopal Church at Broadway and Wall Street in Manhattan.
It was during the Civil War that a priest at that cathedral, the Rev. John Freeman Young, wrote the English translation of "Silent Night" that Americans are so familiar with today.
The influence of his translation shows up in the fact that after he took three of the original verses and changed their order -- using the first, sixth and second stanzas -- the rest of the world began to follow suit, and today, even the Austrians sing those three verses in that order, Mr. Fischer said.
The Rev. Young, who went on to become bishop of Florida and is buried near Jacksonville, also took some liberties with the German text, as hymn translators often do.
The Silent Night Association's English translation of the first verse, for instance, is "Silent Night, Holy Night/ All are sleeping, alone and awake/ Only the intimate holy pair/ Lovely boy with curly hair/ Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace."
In the Rev. Young's hands, that became "Silent Night, Holy Night/ All is calm, all is bright/ Round yon virgin, mother and child/ Holy infant so tender and mild / Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace."
While composer Hal Hopson considers "Silent Night" an ideal Christmas carol, his opinion isn't universal among church musicians.
Paul Westermeyer, a church music professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., and author of a book on hymn tunes, said it's not the easiest song for a congregation to sing.
With its long notes, pauses at the end of each line, and the big slide upward on "peace," the hymn can be a challenge for untrained singers, Dr. Westermeyer said.
"The congregation is an unusual group because it doesn't practice before it sings," he said, "and a congregation has a very hard time sustaining long notes like that."
Another church music composer, Jay Althouse of Raleigh, N.C., agreed that the song poses some challenges: "It's got a very wide range, an octave and a fourth, which is almost as big as 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'" which people find notoriously hard to sing.
But, he added, "church musicians tend to overlook the importance of lyrics, and 'Silent Night's' lyrics are very simple and elegant and easy to grasp."
As to "O Holy Night," which led the Post-Gazette poll, Dr. Westermeyer said it's a classic example of a dramatic 19th-century hymn meant more to be listened to than to be sung by average people.
Sally Albrecht, Jay Althouse's wife and a fellow composer, said, "I can't imagine a whole congregation singing 'O Holy Night,'" which she said is far more difficult than "Silent Night."
"Personally," added her husband, "I think it's tiresome. It's like an Andrew Lloyd Webber piece of its day."
The message of peace in "Silent Night" has come to the forefront many times over the years, but one of the most dramatic examples occurred in 1914, during an unofficial truce on the front lines during World War I.
Stanley Weintraub, a retired Penn State University professor and author of a book on the truce, said that on that first yuletide of the war, the front lines between the British, French and Belgians on the one side and the Germans on the other were often only 75 yards apart.
The Germans shipped thousands of tabletop Christmas trees to their trenches, Dr. Weintraub said, and the soldiers often put lights on them and gathered around to sing "Stille Nacht," which could be heard by curious Allied soldiers who had crawled out into the muddy No Man's Land between the lines.
That led to peaceful contacts between individual soldiers, and by Christmas Day, the rank-and-file combatants had agreed on their own to form solemn burial parties, after which they exchanged gifts, sang carols and played soccer matches all up and down the lines.
One woman linked strongly to the history of "Silent Night" in the United States was the Austrian-born opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, whose granddaughter, Zelda Schumann-Heink Wilmurt, lived in Pittsburgh and performed in the Civic Light Opera.
Because she had remarried after immigrating to the United States, Ms. Schumann-Heink had sons who fought on both sides of World War I.
But she supported the U.S. war effort with frequent appearances at war bond rallies, and later, she established a national tradition in the 1920s by singing "Stille Nacht" on nationwide radio each Christmas Eve for nearly a decade.
The singer's life story exemplifies the way "Silent Night" has transcended nationalities and religious denominations to become a universal Christmas hymn.
And when its notes float into the shadowed air this evening, many will share Diane Ritter's sentiments:
"When we sing it, I feel overwhelming joy and peace; the candlelight reminds me that we need not be afraid, in the dark world we live in. As a mother, I pray that my own children will understand the meaning of the light, and as we go through Advent with them."
First Published December 24, 2006 12:00 am
