1792
Birth of Joseph Mohr, author of “Silent Night”.
Mohr was an Austrian priest. Ordained in 1815 his first parish was the Alpine village of Mariapfarr where he wrote a poem “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!”. Transferred to the St Nicholas church in Oberndorf in 1817 he struck up a friendship with the organist Franz Gruber whom he asked in December 1818 to set “Stille Nacht” to music. Gruber obliged and the new work was premiered with guitar accompaniment at the midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Mohr spent the rest of his life as a parish priest in a number of Austrian villages, dying poor but well-loved.
The song would probably have only been performed on that single occasion and been forgotten had not a visiting musician seen the music in the church in 1825 and taken it away with him. It was played throughout Austria for the next few years, growing in popularity under the title “A Tyrolean Folk Carol”. The authorship of the piece remained a mystery until the 1854 by which time its lyricist was dead. The carol had been attributed to many different composers, including Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven but the director of the Royal Court Choir of Berlin, where “Silent Night” had become the favorite of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, researched the origins of the carol and succeeded in having its true creators credited for their work. The song has been translated into over 200 languages. Its English version was written in 1863 by American Episcopal priest John Freeman Young.