In 1818, Oberndorf was a small village on the bank of the river Salzach, just north of the city of Salzburg, in Austria. Nearly everyone there lived by the water. Some steered the long barges that came down the river loaded with salt; others built and mended those barges in a boatyard on the shore. In winter the river turned grey, the wind cut through everything, and the low houses settled into the snow as though they meant to sleep.

On Christmas Eve of that year, the village was getting ready for the night Mass. The assistant priest of Oberndorf was called Joseph Mohr. He had just turned twenty-six and had lived there a little over a year. He loved music, he talked with the boatmen the way you talk with friends, and he played the guitar, which for a priest in those days was very nearly a scandal.

For two years Joseph had been keeping a sheet of paper. On it was a poem of six verses that he had written in 1816, when he served in a mountain parish called Mariapfarr, up in the Lungau. The lines were about the night Jesus was born: a silent night, a holy night, everything asleep and one small light awake in the middle of the dark. He wrote it, folded it, and put it away. Papers put away sometimes wait years for the right hour.

The right hour came on the twenty-fourth of December, 1818.

That morning, Joseph took out the poem and went to find a friend. The friend was Franz Xaver Gruber, thirty-one years old, the schoolmaster of Arnsdorf, the next village along. Besides teaching the children to read, to count and to sing, Franz was the organist of the church at Oberndorf. In all that stretch of country, nobody understood music the way he did.

Joseph held out the paper and asked him something:

— Could you write a tune for these verses? For two voices and choir, with a guitar to carry it.

A guitar, not the organ. Nobody knows for certain why. Franz himself, who many years later wrote the whole story down, never gave a reason. Perhaps Joseph wanted music that could be held in a person's arms, down close to the people, instead of coming from high up in the gallery. What we do know for certain is what he asked for that morning: two voices, choir and guitar.

Franz read the verses slowly, once, and then again. He carried the paper back to the schoolhouse at Arnsdorf and wrote the melody that same day. It came out simple, rocking gently, almost a lullaby: the two voices walking side by side, one a little above the other, and the guitar keeping a soft swing underneath. By late afternoon he was back with the page in his hand.

— It is ready — he said.

The little church at Oberndorf was dedicated to Saint Nicholas. That night the people came in with the cold still on their coats: boatmen, carpenters from the boatyard, women in shawls, children already half asleep. The lit candles set small points of light trembling on the whitewashed walls. Outside, the river ran on in the dark, exactly as it always did.

At the Mass that night, the two friends sang the new song. Joseph sang the upper part and played the guitar. Franz sang the lower one. At the end of every verse the choir repeated the last two lines, and for a moment the whole church hung inside that echo.

That is the English the world sings now. What Joseph wrote was German, and it began: Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

Many years later, Franz wrote that the song was received with the approval of all. That was all. No newspaper, no long applause, no plaque on the wall. The people walked home through the snow, and the song stayed behind.

But a good song is like a seed: it catches a ride. It is said that an organ builder from the Zillertal valley, Carl Mauracher, came to work on the organs of the district, including the Oberndorf organ in 1825, and carried the melody home with him. From his valley it passed to families who traveled the fairs of Europe singing: the Strasser brothers and sisters, who sold gloves, and the Rainer family. On the fifteenth of December, 1832, the Strassers sang it in Leipzig, and the city paper wrote about it. Around 1833 it was printed in Dresden in a little booklet of four genuine Tyrolean songs, with no mention of Joseph and no mention of Franz. At Christmas of 1839, the Rainers sang it in New York.

The song went round the world, and the two men who made it were left behind and forgotten. Some people swore the music must be by Haydn, or Mozart, or Beethoven. Then, in 1854, the royal chapel in Berlin decided to settle the question and sent to Salzburg to ask. The question reached an old gentleman of sixty-seven who lived in Hallein and still played the organ there: Franz Xaver Gruber. On the thirtieth of December that year he sat down and wrote out everything that had happened, with the days and months and years all in their places. He titled the page an authentic account of how the Christmas carol Stille Nacht came to be. It is thanks to that page that you can read this story today.

Joseph Mohr never knew any of it. He had died in 1848, at fifty-five, in the village of Wagrain, where he was parish priest for the last years of his life. He had spent everything he earned on a school for the poorest children and on care for the old people of the place. When he died he left no money at all. He left a guitar.

The little church of Saint Nicholas is gone. The Salzach flooded it once too often, and in the end it was taken down. Where it used to stand there is now a small eight-sided chapel. Every year on the twenty-fourth of December, people come from many countries, stand in the cold snow, and sing together the song that was born in that village.

And the song is still what it was on the first night: quiet music for two voices and a guitar, made for a small church full of tired people. A song that wakes nobody. A song for going to sleep.