Silent Night is a universally embraced Christmas carol that has a profound power to create peace. I keep listening to it whenever I feel stressed out and I always thought that this heavenly song must be the creation of one of the renowned composers like Bach or Mozart. An article in an old issue of Readers Digest taught me otherwise.

On the Christmas Eve of 1818, in the Church of St Nicholas in Oberndof, a small village in Austria, Curate Josef Mohr was feeling gloomy.The church organ was badly damaged. Mohr, a lover of music and gifted in playing violin and guitar could not think of a midnight mass without music. He doubted that traditional Christmas carols sounded right on a guitar. So he decided to write down a new song.

The image of the mother holding a new born child whom he had blessed the previous day came to him and the words flowed into the paper... 'Stille Nacht..Heilege Nacht..

He took the song to his friend Franz Xaver Gruber who was the music master in the nearby school and who also served as Choir and organ master of the church. Mohr asked Gruber if he could compose a tune for this song which should be suitable for two voices, chorus and guitar and that too in time for the midnight mass.

Gruber wove a plain but hauntingly evocative melody. It was decided that Mohr would play his guitar and sing tenor while Gruber sang bass. The church chorus would follow each stanza.

Silent Night echoed for the first time on that Christmas Eve of 1818.

Later the song passed on to some Tyrolean folk singers who sang it all over Europe. Rainers, a family of folk singers took it across The Atlantic. In 1863 Reverend John Freeman Young translated three stanzas of the song into the English verses that are still sung today.

It was King Frederick William IV who started searching for the origins of this divine song .By that time Father Mohr had died of pneumonia and it was Gruber who gave the details of it birth.

Like Jesus, this heavenly song too had a humble beginning !