Oh Holy Night Organ Sheet Music

[Rebbeca Schulke]

Thesong, which features a lullaby-like melody and a simple message of calm and peace, turns 200 this year, and the sentiment seems as potent and timely now as it likely did in a small Salzburg church two centuries ago.

In 1818, Mohr traveled to the nearby village of Arnsdorf to ask teacher and organist Franz Xaver Gruber if he could compose music that would accompany the lyrics, so he could perform it near the end of that night's Christmas mass. The music was written the same day.

The song became hugely popular, but for several years it was unclear who had written it, so the Royal Court Orchestra in Berlin made a request to St. Peter's Abbey in Salzburg, because it was believed that Michael Hadyn, who was associated with that abbey, had originated the song. By chance, Gruber's son was a choirboy at St. Peter's at the time and clarified the authorship.

There have been many famous performances of the song, from the Three Tenors to Michael Bubl to Faith Hill, but one of the weirdest almost certainly belongs to the just-released duet rendition by Canadian Star Trek actor William Shatner and punk pioneer Iggy Pop. We apologize in advance.

Around the world Silent Night is played on holiday radio stations and performed at Christmas concerts throughout the Christmas season, but in the Austrian alps, there is a strict rule that it must only be performed on Christmas Eve. If it's performed at other times, Bavarian children are told, someone will die.

To this day, the song is one of the most popular in the history of music, and an estimated two billion people perform it in more than 300 languages and dialects. However, the lyrics that most people perform today are notably different from those that Mohr originally wrote. Here are the original verses, as translated directly from German; most English versions today include just three verses: the first, sixth and second, in that order.

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