Every four years, the city of Bad Gastein, Austria, is gripped by racing fever with the arrival of the new year. In an act dating back to the Renaissance, local residents imitate primordial figures, materialized in witches, jesters, demons and the legendary Perchtenlaufen. The population is thrown into a frenzy in the streets of the city on the outskirts of Salzburg. In 2011, the Gastein Perchten Race was included in the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Austria. In the same year, among dozens of other Austrian cultural manifestations, the list became indebted to a song that has assumed the status of a symbol of Christmas melodies for more than two centuries. The inaugural interpretation of the Silent Night theme took place on December 24, 1818. From the German language, the song composed by Father Joseph Mohr and set to music by Franz Xaver Gruber, teacher and organist, would spread into more than 300 languages in the following centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, the language of Camões welcomed Silent Night to “dress” it as Noite Feliz. The song found the Portuguese language through the work of Frei Pedro Sinzig, a German living in Brazil. Happy Night became a Christmas carol, in a story that accompanied a troubled period in Europe, won the affection of emperors and monarchs, crossed oceans with the voices of Tyrolean choirs, gave rise to myths and legends and took over the record sales charts.
The year 1816 was a year of misfortune for Europe. The Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century left a trail of tragedy in the form of violence, death and hunger. The Austrian Empire and the neighboring Kingdom of Bavaria also fought with each other for years. Atmospheric vagaries aim to destroy agricultural crops. In 1815, thousands of miles from European soil, the Tambora volcano on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia (then the Dutch Eastern Islands) exploded in a furious eruption. In just a few days, the atmosphere received tens of millions of tons of material taken from the planet’s core and ejected through the volcanic cone. Within two weeks, sulfur particles, among other things, became tragically stuck in the Earth’s stratosphere. The global temperature dropped by almost 1ºC. In Europe there was hunger, disease and resulting emigration. It is in this context that a Catholic priest, born in 1792, composed a song in 1816 in the town of Mariapfarr. Verses that “address the human desire for an all-encompassing peace that conveys a sense of camaraderie and promotes interpersonal exchange and mutual understanding,” as reported in the text summarizing Still Nacht by Joseph Mohr on the online page of the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage from Austria. Two years later, Mohr transferred his verses to the musical skills of Franz Xaver Gruber. Noite Feliz acquired the sound of guitar and flute, also voices and an audience, who attended midnight mass in St. Nicholas Church in the town of Oberndorf on December 24, 1818. Silent Night could have remained among the many other Christmas carols that did not reach the world stage. The reason was that among those present in the St. Nicholas Church was Karl Mauracher, an organ builder and repairer who at the time maintained the instrument in the church in Oberndorf. Karl fell in love with music and took it with him to his native Zillertal. There, nestled in the Tyrolean mountains, Noite Feliz rested before embarking on an international career. The Zillertal lived in the era of the Tyrolean national singers. Among these groups, the Rainer family of singers stood out. With this, Noite Feliz traveled to the ears of Francis I of Austria and Alexander I of Russia in December 1822. First moment of a tour through Germany, Sweden and England. Frederick William IV of Prussia had among his favorites the verses of Noite Feliz; Joseph Greis, a printer and bookseller in the town of Steyr, discovered the wonder in the melody. Between 1827 and 1832 (the date is not precise) he published a pamphlet entitled Four Beautiful New Christmas Carols. Noite Feliz was part of the quartet. As late as 1839, the song crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the voices of the Rainer family to arrive in New York, followed by New Orleans, St. Louis and Philadelphia. Twenty years later, in 1859, John Freeman Young, a priest of the Episcopal Church in New York, made the first translation of the text of Silent Night into the English language. Silent Night was born. Music for orchestra was first arranged in Europe in 1845.
In Terras de Vera Cruz, Frei Pedro Sinzig, born in 1876 in Linz-Rhine, Germany, and naturalized as a Brazilian in 1898, revealed himself as a born journalist. He founded Cruzeiro do Sul and the magazine Vozes de Petrópolis, among others. His writing resulted in dozens of religious works, novels and novels. In the book Reminiscências de um Frade, the cleric tells his paths in the hinterland of Bahia. Musician, composer, musicologist, conductor of choirs and orchestras, professor and director of the School of Sacred Music, Frei Pedro Sinzig was editor of the magazine Música Sacra which he founded in 1941. His creativity led to more than a hundred compositions, from oratorios to festive masses, from litanies to opera. Sinzig became a member of the Brazilian Academy of Music, which was then chaired by his friend Villa-Lobos. At the beginning of the 20th century, Pedro Sinzig began translating Stille Nacht, a song that was widely distributed through leaflets circulated in churches. The cleric died on December 8, 1852 in Düsseldorf. Sinzig’s remains are found in the São João Batista Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. From Pedro Sinzig’s translation we read in Noite Feliz: “Happy night! Happy night!/O Lord, God of love/Poor little man was born in Bethlehem/Behold, in the lapa, Jesus, our good one!/Sleep in peace , O Jesus!/ Sleep tight, O Jesus!” A later anonymous version, translated from Portugal into Portuguese, entitled Night of Peace, reports: “Night of peace! Night of love!/Everything sleeps around/Under the stars that shed light/Proclaiming the baby Jesus/The star shines from peace!/the star of peace shines!”
“It is a simple lullaby in Sicilian rhythm (…) in baroque and classical music it was often used for pastoral scenes (…) the music is written in German, the rhythm is based on the bagpipes of Sicilian shepherds ( . ..) the song is neither liturgical nor strict, it is a song full of love, for a newborn child (…) it belongs to everyone in the world who has good intentions,” musicologist and playwright Gottfried Kasparek summarizes in an article he writes about Noite Feliz, Thoughts on the Global Sucess (“Reflections on Global Success”).
In 1968, Silent Night found its seventh art in the film The Legend of Silent Night, a work narrated by actor Kirk Douglas. However, the piece of music that was first sung in a modest Austrian church in 1818 would acquire star status in the voices of pop artists. Irish Sinead O’Connor, with long blond hair, appears in a 1991 music video singing Silent Night (available on YouTube). The video produced by Peter Gabriel occupied the 71st position in the charts in December of that year. the 1935 version sung by the North American Bing Crosby, which sold more than ten million copies and is included in the list of the greatest musical hits of all time.
Source: DN
