O Holy Night

[Verse 1]
O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees; O hear the Angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born
O night, O Holy night, O night divine!

[Verse 2]
Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming
Here come the Wise Men from Orient land
The King of kings lay thus in lowly manger
In all our trials born to be our friend
He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger
Behold your King; before Him lowly bend
Behold your King; before Him lowly bend.

[Verse 3]
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is Peace
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother
And in His name, all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we
Let all within us Praise His Holy name
Christ is the Lord; O praise His name forever!
His power and glory evermore proclaim
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

French text by Placide Cappeau, 1847 · Music by Adolphe Adam · English translation by John Sullivan Dwight, 1855 · First sung at Midnight Mass in Roquemaure, France, Christmas 1847

You probably know this one by heart, and many of us have sung it every December for as long as we can remember. What’s surprising is how unlikely it was that we’d ever get to sing it at all. It began with a French wine merchant who hardly ever went to church, it was set to music by a man who wrote ballets for a living, and before a single American had heard it, a bishop had already declared it unfit.

The wine merchant was Placide Cappeau, of the little town of Roquemaure in the south of France. As a boy of eight he lost a hand in an accident — a friend was playing with a gun — and that turned him away from the family barrel-making trade and toward books and poetry instead. So in 1847, when the parish priest needed something special to celebrate the church’s newly repaired organ, he turned to Cappeau, who was probably the last man in town anyone would have called devout. Cappeau wrote the poem on a long coach ride to Paris, and once he had it, he decided it deserved music. He brought it to his friend Adolphe Adam, a composer best known for the ballet Giselle, and that Christmas it was sung at midnight mass in Roquemaure. From there it spread all over France.

Not everyone was pleased. One French bishop complained that the carol had no musical taste and no religious spirit at all, and a number of churches quietly set it aside — a poet who had drifted from the faith and a composer of light theater pieces struck them as the wrong sort of men for a sacred song. The ordinary people of France went right on singing it at home. Then, in 1855, it crossed the Atlantic and found John Sullivan Dwight, a Unitarian minister and music critic who lived at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist community outside Boston. Dwight translated it very freely — that soaring moment we all wait for was more his creation than Cappeau’s — and he sharpened the last verse into a clear statement that the enslaved man is our brother and that oppression will one day end. Printed six years before the Civil War, those were not gentle words.

The carol took root in the North during the war years, and there were Southern churches that would not sing it. It’s a remarkable journey for a poem written to celebrate a church organ — scolded by a bishop, taken up by abolitionists, and sung today by millions of people who would never guess it caused any trouble at all.