Silent Night: the story behind the carol

A young priest, Joseph Mohr, wrote the German poem in 1816. On Christmas Eve 1818 he walked it over to the village schoolteacher and organist, Franz Xaver Gruber, and asked for a melody for two voices and a guitar. They sang it together that night at the Midnight Mass in St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, near Salzburg.

An organ repairman took the song home to the Tyrol, where travelling family singers made it famous across Europe. The English words most people sing today are John Freeman Young's 1859 translation of three of Mohr's six verses.

The famous story that the church organ was broken that night comes from a fictional account published in the 1930s — there's no evidence for it.