Silent Night First Sung: A Christmas Tradition Born

A broken church organ forced the creation of the most recorded song in history. On Christmas Eve 1818, Father Joseph Mohr arrived at the home of schoolteacher and organist Franz Xaver Gruber in Arnsdorf, Austria, carrying a poem he had written two years earlier and an urgent problem: the organ at St. Nikolaus Church in nearby Oberndorf had malfunctioned, and Mohr needed a musical setting that could be performed with just a guitar for that evening Mass. Gruber composed the melody in a matter of hours. That night, the two men stood before their small congregation and performed "Stille Nacht" as a duet accompanied by Gruber guitar, with the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse in four-part harmony. The song made little impression beyond the village. When organ builder Karl Mauracher came to repair the instrument, he heard the composition and carried it back to the Zillertal region, where traveling folk singers picked it up and spread it across Europe. The song reached the United States in 1839 when the Rainer Family Singers performed it during a concert tour that included a performance for the New York State Legislature. By the American Civil War, soldiers on both sides of the conflict sang it in the trenches. The melody proved so universally appealing that it transcended language, denomination, and culture. Bing Crosby 1935 recording became one of the best-selling singles of all time, with over 30 million copies sold. The original manuscript was lost for over a century until a version in Mohr handwriting was discovered in 1995. UNESCO designated "Silent Night" as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. The song has been translated into more than 300 languages and is performed billions of times each December, making it by most measures the most widely sung composition in human history. The little church in Oberndorf was demolished in the early twentieth century due to repeated flood damage, but a memorial chapel stands on the site.