|
Silent Night in 330 languages
14/12/2003 14:55 - (SA)
Oberndorf - A problem with the church organ in this tiny Austrian town was behind the birth 185 years ago of the biggest Christmas hit of all time -- "Silent Night, Holy Night".
Translated into 330 languages, the carol put Oberndorf on the map and this Christmas Eve thousands of tourists will as usual visit the hamlet near Salzburg, home to only 6 000 people.
On December 23, 1818, the old organ of the Saint Nicholas church gave up the ghost, leaving Father Joseph Mohr to worry that the peasants in his parish and the ferrymen who worked on the nearby Salzach river would spend Christmas without music.
He asked his friend Franz Xaver Gruber, the organ player in the neighbouring village of Arnsdorf, to compose music for a text he had written two years earlier.
The next evening Gruber and Mohr, a tenor who played the guitar, performed Silent Night for the first time, singing in German.
This was unusual because at the time religious texts were always in Latin. But Mohr had wanted something simple that could be easily understood by the hundreds of ferrymen and farmworkers who usually attended his midnight mass.
In 1831, the song was discovered and exported by a group of folk singers from the Tyrol mountains.
They decided to perform it during a visit to Prussia and from there it spread to New York, where another Tyrolean group performed it in 1839.
The origins of the carol, however, remained unknown and another 36 years later, the Prussian royal house set out to find the original script and contacted the parish of Saint Pierre in Salzburg.
At the time it was widely believed that Silent Night was the work of the Austrian composer Michael Haydn, so the Prussian royals were surprised to hear that it had been written by Mohr and Gruber, who were both dead by then.
- SAPA
|
News
