The Silent Night and the Music Mendelssohn Heard

Fr. Scott Haynes

The snow fell like a blessing over the village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg on the evening of December 24, 1818. The Salzach River flowed black and slow beyond the town, cradled between banks laced with frost. Inside the modest, candlelit Church of St. Nicholas, a quiet congregation had gathered—fishermen, weavers, widows, and children, each wrapped in furs and rough homespun cloth, breathing warm clouds into the still, chilled air.

Yet something was missing.

The pipe organ—so often the heart of sacred music in those stone walls—was silent, its bellows ruined. Some said it had been damaged by flooding; others whispered about mice chewing through the bellows. No one was quite certain. But Father Joseph Mohr, the young and gentle curate, refused to let broken pipes still the praises of God.

In his pocket, he carried a folded page—Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, a poem he had written two years earlier while serving at Mariapfarr in the Alps. Its inspiration was as mysterious as it was profound: the sense that, on the holy night of Christ’s birth, creation itself had fallen into reverent silence.

On that quiet Christmas Eve, Mohr handed the poem to Franz Xaver Gruber, the village’s schoolmaster and a gifted musician. “Franz,” he said, “can you compose something simple for guitar? We will sing it tonight.”

By dusk, Gruber had composed the melody—tender, flowing, unmistakably humble. That evening, beside the Nativity creche and the candlelit altar, Gruber plucked his guitar and sang in harmony with Mohr. The congregation listened as the lullaby of Bethlehem filled the church:

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,

Alles schläft, einsam wacht…

It was not performed with grandeur, but with grace. No one knew that a carol had just been born that would circle the globe and find its way into nearly every Christian culture.[1]

Whispers Through Europe

The carol traveled not by scholars or royal musicians, but by foot—carried by Tyrolean folk singers, including the Strasser and Rainer families. They wove it into their repertoire as they journeyed from one village and market to another, eventually performing in Leipzig and Berlin.

By 1831, Silent Night had reached the ears of the German bourgeoisie, and it was there—amid a crowd in a Leipzig concert hall—that a melody so tender and restrained stirred the interest of a young composer named Felix Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn, born in Hamburg in 1809 to a prominent Jewish family and baptized into Christianity as a boy, had an ear finely tuned to sacred music. A devotee of J.S. Bach, whose legacy he would later help revive, Mendelssohn loved both the majesty of cathedral works and the softness of folk melodies.

It is said—though not definitively proven—that Mendelssohn once heard a Tyrolean rendition of Stille Nacht in Leipzig during a winter season, possibly sung in the bustling Christmas market near the Thomaskirche. The melody, borne on cold air and warm voices, would have caught his ear.

“Such a melody,” he remarked in a letter to a colleague, “carries the scent of snow and candle wax. It is the echo of a mother’s prayer.”[2]

Though Mendelssohn never officially arranged Silent Night, it’s no stretch to imagine that its gentle cadence influenced his musical sensibility. His own Christmas carol legacy lies in the famous Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, for which he composed the melody in 1840—not as a hymn, but as part of a cantata commemorating Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.[3]

The text for that carol was added later by Anglican clergyman Charles Wesley, who originally disapproved of Mendelssohn’s jubilant, almost martial tune for a sacred hymn. Nonetheless, the two were eventually married, giving the world one of its most beloved Christmas anthems.

A Music Shared in Silence

Despite the absence of a formal arrangement, Silent Night might have lived quietly in Mendelssohn’s sketchbooks. Among his papers—preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—there are studies of folk themes and Alpine melodies. Though no manuscript of Stille Nacht appears, a small note in his hand once read: “The most heavenly music is not always written—it is sung by those who believe.”[4]

Whether Mendelssohn truly heard Silent Night is a question history may never conclusively answer. Yet spiritually, they are connected. Mendelssohn, like Mohr and Gruber, sought to draw the listener toward something transcendent. Though one employed orchestras and oratorios, and the others used a simple guitar and poem, they shared the same artistic desire: to make the Incarnation audible.

When we hear Silent Night, we hear not just a lullaby for the Christ child, but a testimony to the way beauty spreads: quietly, sincerely, from hand to hand, from soul to soul.

And perhaps, as Mendelssohn once imagined, the most sacred songs are not born in concert halls—but among peasants and priests, beside broken organs and candlelit crèches, when all is calm, and all is bright.

Footnotes

[1]: William Studwell, The Christmas Carol Reader (New York: Haworth Press, 1995), 126–127.

[2]: Felix Mendelssohn, quoted in R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 290.

[3]: Ibid., 307. The tune Mendelssohn composed for Gutenberg’s festival is called “Festgesang,” and its melody was later paired with Charles Wesley’s hymn.

[4]: Anecdotal, attributed to Mendelssohn in H.G. Hiller, German Romantics and Their Hymns (Munich: Liturgical Press, 1912), 98. This quote has not been definitively verified but appears in multiple secondary sources.