All Is Calm All Is Bright

Born in Salzburg 200 years ago, one of the world’s most recognisable melodies has a rich and fascinating heritage to discover.

- John Malathronas

It’s snowing heavily but who’s complaining? It’s what I’d expect outside the Silent Night Chapel in Oberndorf, where arguably the world’s best-known carol was first performed on Christmas Eve 1818. My guide, Sepp, takes me up a defensive flood barrier to gaze upon the river Salzach making a U-turn, scenically wedging the town of Laufen on the other bank. He apologises for the steep climb. “The Salzach becomes ferocious in the spring when the ice melts in the Alps,” he says. These floods are an important part of the story of Silent Night. In 1818, the organist at Oberndorf’s St Nicholas Church was Franz Xaver Gruber, a teacher in a primary school at nearby Arnsdorf. A weaver’s son, he’d done well to land the job. Meanwhile, the village priest was Joseph Mohr, the illegitimate son of an army musketeer and a Salzburg seamstress. With the organ out of action due to flood damage, Mohr was desperate to celebrate mass with something uplifting. He fished out a poem he’d written a few years back called Silent Night, and asked Gruber to compose a song based on it for guitar, two voices and choir. Gruber knocked up the melody in an afternoon and they both sang the new carol that evening with the congregation who had stayed on after mass.