Avery
German language original version of "Silent Night".
The original was written and first performed in 1818 in a small village in the alps near Salzburg in Austria.
Back then the region was devastated by war and mice had actually destroyed the billows of the church organ.
The assistant priest assigned to this parish was desperate when he found out on Christmas Eve and went to his friend, the local teacher and organ player with the text of the poem "Silent Night" he had written some years earlier.
With in a few hours, just in time for the Christmas Evening church service, they wrote the melody - for tenor and bass with a single guitar as the only instrument available to them.
The simplicity and beauty of the arrangement ensured, it would go on to become the most popular Christmas Song in the world. Today there are translations in pretty much every language in the world where even a few Christian people are living, more than 300 by now (for comparison, there are slightly less than 200 countries in the world).
