It’s Christmas time and once again, like many of you, my family and I enjoyed a candlelit carol service at our local church. I do like this event each year; it marks the arrival of Christmas-proper and is the time when you can pause from the merry-go-round that is Christmas-in-practice and just enjoy the moment. Carols such as O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, The Herald Angels Sing are ideal for a packed church with a rousing organ (who doesn’t enjoy blasting out those barnstorming Victorian lines such as “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb” and “Hail th’incarnate Deity”?). The carol that I want to write about today, on the other hand, is better suited to a far more reserved affair: Silent Night is made for hushed tones and a gentle accompaniment, and for me is the very epitome of the reflective element of the season.

The story goes that the carol was first performed on the evening of Christmas Eve in 1818, in St Nicholas Church, Oberndorf, in present-day Austria. The young Catholic priest at the church, Joseph Mohr, found himself in a bit of a pickle when the church organ became incapacitated just before that evening’s Christmas Mass service (in the manner of boilers breaking down at just this wrong time of year, I suppose). Thinking on his feet, he remembered that he had written a nice poem a few years before called Stille Nacht, and wondered if local schoolmaster and organist Franz Gruber might set its six stanzas to music for guitar.

Gruber readily agreed to step into the breach and wrote a melody there and then – and that night, the two men sang Stille Nacht for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, with Mohr playing guitar and the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse. According to Gruber, the organ builder who serviced the instrument at the Oberndorf church, was so enamoured of the song that he took the composition home with him to the Zillertal valley in the Tyrol where he shared it with musical friends. From there, two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows, and its popularity spread all over Europe.

It’s a very moving and humbling song; as a testament to its global popularity, it was sung by troops during the famous Christmas truce of World War I, perhaps because it was the one tune that was familiar to all of them. How poignant the words must have seemed at that particular moment!

Here is a rendition by the Spanish sopranos Montserrat Caballé and her daughter Montserrat Martí. Merry Christmas!