Silent Night
The story behind the favourite Christmas carol
by Tim Dowley (adapted from an assembly first published in 2018)
Suitable for Whole School (Sec)
Aims
To consider the origins of the Christmas carol ‘Silent night’ and why it is still popular today.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the PowerPoint slides that accompany this assembly (Silent Night) and the means to display them.
- Have available the Christmas carol ‘Silent night’ and the means to play it during the assembly. A version is available at: https://youtu.be/_vw--yxcDNM (3.29 minutes long)
- Tim Dowley’s book Christian Music - A Global History is available at: https://spckpublishing.co.uk/christian-music-pb
Assembly
- Ask the students if they have any favourite Christmas songs.
Listen to a range of responses.
Ask them if they have any favourite Christmas carols.
Listen to a range of responses.
- Point out that at Christmastime, Christmas music is heard in many places: in the shops, on the television, on the radio and so on.
- Ask if any of the students have heard of the Christmas carol ‘Silent night’.
Play the Christmas carol ‘Silent night’ (3.29 minutes long), showing the lyrics on Slides 1-3 as the song is played. - Show Slide 4.
Explain that ‘Silent night’ was originally written in German over 200 years ago. It was written to be sung on Christmas Eve at a tiny village church amid the snowy Austrian mountains.
Show Slide 5.
If possible, ask a student to read out the verse in German. - Explain that because ‘Silent night’ is such a well-known carol, many legends have sprung up about why it was written.
One story is that there was a hungry mouse in the village church, and the only thing it could find to eat was the leather bellows used to blow air into the organ. The mouse nibbled away at the bellows until finally, they broke.
Without bellows to blow the air, the organ wouldn’t work, so the young village priest, Joseph Mohr, needed a song that could be accompanied by a guitar instead of an organ. He needed a new Christmas hymn badly, so he wrote the words himself and came up with ‘Silent night’. - Point out that there are many famous German composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Strauss, but ‘Silent night’ wasn’t written by any of them. Instead, after Joseph had written the words to ‘Silent night’, he showed them to his good friend, Franz Gruber, a schoolteacher in the village. A tune for his friend’s carol soon popped into Franz’s mind.
- Tell the students that on Christmas Eve in 1818, in the little Austrian church, the two friends sang ‘Silent night’ together, with Joseph playing the new tune on his guitar.
How exciting it must have been to hear that simple, beautiful tune for the very first time! More than 200 years later, the original score, with Franz’s tune in his own writing, still exists.
Show Slide 6. - Nearly a century after Franz and Joseph sang together, the First World War began. German soldiers were fighting Allied soldiers day after day, night after night. They dug long trenches opposite one another to keep safe from the bullets. If they lifted their heads out of the trenches, they were in terrible danger.
- A few months after the start of the war in 1914, Christmas arrived. It was very cold and snowy. It is said that some of the Germans in their trenches began to sing, ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’. As the singing drifted over to the British trenches, the soldiers there could scarcely believe their ears. Then, some of them began to join in, in English: ‘Silent night, holy night’. Of course, the tune of the carol was the same in both languages, so all of the soldiers were able to sing ‘Silent night’, but in their own language.
- For a short time that Christmas, peace came to the trenches. Some of the soldiers climbed out and met the opposing soldiers in no man’s land, the strip of land between the two sets of trenches. They shook hands with soldiers whom they had been shooting at only the day before. Some even played football together. At various locations in the battlefields, short truces brought moments of peace as the soldiers remembered the very first Christmas, when baby Jesus was born in the village of Bethlehem.
Time for reflection
Show Slides 1-3 again.
Ask the students to think about the words of the carol, and then ask the following questions.
- Who is the mother in the carol?
- Who is the child?
- Who are the ‘heavenly hosts’?
- Why are they singing?
Remind the students that for a short time, peace came to the battlefields of the First World War. Ask them to consider how they could bring peace this Christmas to the lives of those around them, both in school and at home.
Prayer
Dear God,
Please help us to remember the story of Jesus being born in Bethlehem.
Let’s sing praise with the angels.
Let’s be happy like the shepherds.
Let’s give presents like the wise men.
Let’s close the door of hate
And open the door of love, all over the world.
Amen.
Song/music
‘Silent night’, available at: https://youtu.be/_vw--yxcDNM (3.29 minutes long)
