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From Abroad

Silent night, holy night…

We sang this carol in yesterday’s Christmas mess that I attended. Singing this was very nice, not only because it is a beautiful piece of music but it comes from Austria.

In Oberndorf, a town at the Salzach River, not far from where I grew up the local priest Joseph Mohr faced a problem on 1818’s Christmas Eve. The organ did not work but he had to carry out a mess. So he asked the organist, Franz Xaver Gruber to create a melody for Christmas lyrics he Mohr composed two years earlier.

And within this very Christmas Eve’s afternoon he composed the world’s most famous Christmas carol. Nowadays it is translated into 300 different languages or dialects and hence sung all over the world.

This video shows an Austrian boy’s choir, singing the original lyrics that are now almost 200 years old.

I wish you all a very merry Christmas or “Frohe Weihnachten” as we say in Austria.