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Date: December 23, 2018 01:51PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/23/silent-night-how-beloved-christmas-carol-was-born-war-disaster-years-agoOn Christmas Eve in 1818, two men with a small guitar entered a church in Oberndorf, Austria, and prepared to sing a new Christmas carol.
Times had been bad in Oberndorf, where many people worked on the water, manning the salt barges that plied the Salzach River. The upheaval in central Europe caused by the Napoleonic Wars had just ended.
And only two years before, the dreadfully dark summer of 1816 — later blamed on ash from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia — had caused famine and deprivation.
But in that fall of 1816, a young Catholic priest, Joseph Mohr, had written a six-verse Christmas poem that began “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” — Silent Night, Holy Night — about the Nativity of a curly haired Jesus.
Two years later, Father Mohr enlisted a friend, Franz Xaver Gruber, a local schoolteacher and musician, to come up with a melody for the poem that could be played for Christmas on the guitar. (Legend has it that the church organ had been damaged by mice or water and was on the blink.)
Gruber’s composition is thought to have taken about a day.
Now, as the two men put the words to music that Thursday 200 years ago in Oberndorf’s St. Nicholas Church, they voiced for the first time what is probably history’s most enduring and beloved Christmas carol.