Silent Night

Just four gentle notes and we find ourselves walking towards a snow-covered chapel nestled in a snowy Austrian forest. We open the wooden doors and are drawn across old planks towards a simple altar, graced with candles and boughs of fragrant pines. In the air wafts the simple melody of Silent Night, floating above the harmonies of a guitar.

Silent Night (Stille Nacht), the second-most popular Christmas Carol in German, had its origin in 1818 in the tiny Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg (literally the “over-village” to Salzburg). You probably know a version of the story. A new song was needed for Christmas Eve, so the young priest Josef Mohr (1792-1848) serving as curate for the parish, handed a poem he’d written two years earlier to his colleague, schoolmaster and organist Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863), who fashioned the melody. The two men sang the song as a duet supported by choir, with the instrumental accompaniment played by Mohr on the guitar.

After Christmas, copies of Silent Night were distributed freely. The song took on a life of its own, becoming so popular that it traveled across Europe as far as the tsarist courts in Russia. Some thought it was a Tyrolean folksong; others decided it had been composed by no less than Beethoven or Haydn. Only later did its actual origin come to be known, often in romanticized versions that attributed use of the guitar to the “fact” that the organ had been damaged by flooding (perhaps, perhaps not) or the narrative that Silent Night was composed more or less on the spot as the hour for Christmas-Eve Mass drew near.

Well, even if these romanticized accounts are not fully accurate, they do ring true. Composers of music, particularly sacred music, have long written things hastily due to various necessities, employing whatever musical resources are at hand. If the whole of Silent Night had been thrown together in a few hours, that in and of itself would not be unusual.

That this song has kept its currency, embraced around the world, is a surprise! And, yes, I described it as the “second” most popular German-language Carol because there is one even more beloved by German speakers: O du Fröliche. This wonderful song (which brings the same tears to the eye as Silent Night at Christmastime) is not as so well known in the English-speaking world, nor does it have the same kind of romantic origin. Yet, when placed together with Silent Night, you have a most magnificent seasonal pairing.

Wouldn’t you love to visit the church at Oberndorf bei Salzburg where Silent Night had its birth? Well, you can, but you can’t. The actual St. Nicholas Church, damaged by repeated flooding, was moved upstream and today is gone. On its original site, though, the townspeople of Oberndorf built a small (and I do mean small) chapel named the Stille-Nacht-Kapelle (Silent-Night Memorial Chapel).

This chapel has become a shrine, as you might guess. It too experiences floods—floods of tourists! Ordinarily, a person visiting in December needs the same fortitude required to push through any popular historical site. You know how it is: once you need ticket booths, everything changes. Also, as you might guess, the privilege of being able to enter the chapel and hear Silent Night sung at Christmas-Eve Mass is granted to very few persons with special status.

But what about this year of the shutdown when mass tourism in Europe has vanished? While I do not know for sure, it would not surprise me if the atmosphere around the Silent-Night Chapel this calendar year has felt a bit more like the times of 1818, or at least the times described in the following story.

This story is told by our family’s dear friend Joan Cantwell, cattle rancher, magnificent mom and grandmother, and pillar of her community of Bowie, Texas. As a new bride just married to James, a soldier stationed in Germany, she and he were able to make a spontaneous visit to the Stille-Nacht-Kapelle before it became a tourist hot-spot. The Cantwells have had marvelous adventures together throughout a long marriage of 57 years. But you could say that the magic of their marriage started with Silent Night on their first Christmas Eve as husband and wife.