December 24, 2023

“Silent Night” – the origin and evolving words of the famous Christmas carol...


In 1818, during the annual Christmas Midnight Mass at the St. Nicholas Church at Oberndorf, Austria, the song we know as “Silent Night! Holy Night!” (or just “Silent Night”) was performed in public for the first time.

Most sources say this happened on Christmas Eve, the night of December 24, 1818, though some say it was after midnight on December 25.

The lyrics of the song were written in German by Joseph Mohr (1792-1848), an Austrian Catholic priest who sang tenor during the song’s debut.

The church organist, Franz Gruber (1787-1863), wrote the music.

During that first performance of the song, Gruber accompanied Mohr and the choir on guitar. According to legend, he played a guitar because a mouse had chewed on and damaged the bellows of the church organ.

The original German title of the song — “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” — is taken from the opening line of the first verse:

      “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
       Alles schläft; einsam wacht
       Nur das traute heilige Paar.
       Holder Knab im lockigten Haar,
       Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
       Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!”

Today, the familiar English version of this first verse that most of us know is:

      “Silent night! Holy night!
       All is calm, all is bright.
       Round yon virgin mother and child,
       Holy infant so tender and mild.
       Sleep in heavenly peace,
       Sleep in heavenly peace.”

However, it wasn’t until the 20th Century that this version became standard. And, although it’s the only one most people are aware of today, there have actually been many different English translations.

A literal English translation of the German words of the first verse is something like this:

      “Silent night! Holy night!
       All are sleeping, alone and awake
       Only the intimate holy pair,
       Lovely boy with curly hair,
       Sleep in heavenly peace!
       Sleep in heavenly peace!”

The most famous English version of the song was written by American Episcopal Bishop John Freeman Young (1820-1885) and first published in 1859.

Young made up his own words for the middle part of the first verse and for most of the other two verses (of the original six) that he “translated.”

His English adaptation became the one that’s best known. But it wasn’t the first.

According to the authoritative, amazingly detailed history of the song on The Hymns and Carols of Christmas site, an American named J. F. Warner created what is believed to be the oldest English version of Mohr’s German lyrics in 1849.

Warner titled the song “Silent Night! Hallowed Night!”

That makes sense since “hallowed” is one of the possible translations of the German word Heilige. (It can also be translated as awed, blessed, devout, righteous, sacred, saintly, solemn — or holy.)

Warner’s lyrics for the rest of the first verse (and other verses) are, if anything, even more creative “translations” than Young’s.

He started his version of the song this way:

      “Silent night! halllow’d night!
       Land and deep silent sleep,
       Softly glitters bright Bethlehem’s star,
       Beck’ning Israel’s eye from afar,
       Where the Saviour is born,
       Where the Saviour is born.”

Another early English translation that preceded Young’s was written in 1858 by Emily E.S. Elliott. She titled her version of the song “Stilly Night, Holy Night.” Elliott’s lyrics also bear little relation to the original German.

Since then, twenty or so other English versions of “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” have been created, each with its own unique lyrics.

But at some unknown turning point in the 20th Century, for some unknown reason, Rev. Young’s became the standard.

There’s a good chance you’ve been hearing — and possibly singing — his words this Holiday season.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa and Happy Everything Else from ThisDayinQuotes.com!

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Related listening and reading…

    

December 14, 2023

I’m dreaming of a white, gay, green, brown or red Christmas...


THE FAMOUS CHRISTMAS SONG:

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know.
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow.
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write.
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white.”
      
Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
       American songwriter 
       Lyrics of Berlin’s song
“White Christmas”
       “White Christmas” was publicly introduced and made famous by the 1942 film Holiday Inn, in which it is
sung by Bing Crosby. The fact that it became one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time may seem a bit ironic, since Berlin was Jewish. However, as noted by journalist Nate Bloom in a post on the InterfaithFamily.com website, 12 of the 25 most popular Christmas holiday songs were written by Jews.

          

THE GAY FRIENDLY VERSION:

“I’m dreaming of a gay Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know.
Where the treetops shimmer with rainbow glitter
And ev-ry fella had a beau.
Oh, I’m dreaming of a gay Christmas
With Every Streisand song I play.
And no matter which way you sway
I hope all your Christmases are gay.”
       The “Gay Christmas” song, from
the “Last Christmas” musical show, first performed in 2007 by Theatre Out, a California-based gay and lesbian theatre group.

           

THE ECO-FRIENDLY VERSION:

“I’m dreaming of a green Christmas
Not like the ones I used to know.
With presents handmade or re-gifted
To prevent the climate being shifted
And leaving Christmas trees to grow.” 
      
Nancy Hiler, the “Go Green Gal” 
       In a blog post titled
“I’m Dreaming of a Green Christmas (with apologies to Irving Berlin)” 

           

THE LATINO VERSION:

“I’m dreaming of a brown Christmas,
Just like the one in Mexico.
Where bunuelos glisten,
Posadas at the mission,
And yes, we don’t need no snow.”
      
El Vez (stage name of Robert Lopez)
       Mexican-American rock and roll artist
       From his song
“Brown Christmas”

           

THE CHRISTMAS CHEERS! VERSION:

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
But if the white runs out
I’ll drink the red.” 
       A
popular variation I first saw as the caption of this cartoon from the now defunct website YourFunnyStuff.com. It inspired the title of a notebook you can buy for Christmas.

      

   

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Christmas parody reading and listening

December 12, 2023

“Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”


In the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis became one of the most successful writers in America.

During that decade he penned a series of five hugely popular novels: Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth.

In 1930, Lewis became the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy that makes decisions about that award. He was given the award not for one specific book but in recognition of “his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.”

When Lewis gave his official acceptance address to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on December 12, 1930, he made a remark that would become a famous, widely-cited quotation:

       “Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

The story behind that quote involves some now little-known facts about America’s literary and academic history.

In the culture war of recent decades, the most common criticism of college professors as a group has been the claim that they are mostly left-leaning, “effete intellectual,” anti-American liberals.

But in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, America’s academic establishment seemed stuffily conservative to boundary-pushing writers like Lewis.

The members of the nation’s top official organization dedicated to fostering “excellence” in American literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was largely composed of hidebound academics and celebrities who were almost all elderly, White and male.

And, through most of the 1920s, the guidelines for awarding America’s annual Pulitzer Prize for fiction stated that the prize was intended to be “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.”

Lewis’ first widely-read novel, Main Street (1920), satirized the typical close-minded society of small towns in America. His second, Babbitt (1922), skewered middle-class American businessmen and families. Both titles became symbolic terms for social conformity.

Main Street and Babbitt were huge bestsellers, praised by many critics and suggested as nominees for the Pulitzer Prize. But they clearly bumped up against the outdated guidelines for that award and neither won.

In 1926, the Pulitzer Prize Committee finally did decide to give Lewis a Pulitzer for his third bestseller, Arrowsmith, a novel that focused on an idealistic doctor. However, at that point Lewis decided to thumb his nose at them and refused to accept it.

The letter he wrote to the Committee foreshadows his later Nobel Prize address.

Lewis said the “wholesome” guideline language for the Pulitzer meant that “the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

“Between the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters...amateur boards of censorship, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies,” he added, “every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest...I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.”

Four years later, when Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, one tight-assed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters attacked the decision publicly. By awarding the prize to a writer who had scoffed at American institutions, he sniffed, the Nobel Committee and the Swedish Academy had insulted America.

Lewis reflected on all this in the acceptance address he gave in Sweden on December 12, 1930.

He titled it “The American Fear of Literature.” And, in it, he aimed some pointed barbs at America’s academic and literary establishment.

He criticized the American Academy of Arts and Letters saying, among other things: “It does not represent the literary America of today, it represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” 

He also took another poke at the Pulitzer Committee and others who tried to make literature conform to rah-rah, politically-correct standards.

In America, he said:

“…even writers are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American...To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers.”

Then, Lewis took some shots at the typical professors of literature at America’s universities, in a section of the speech that ends with his famous quotation:

“To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead; it is something magically produced by superhuman beings who must, if they are to be regarded as artists at all, have died at least one hundred years before the diabolical invention of the typewriter. To any authentic don, there is something slightly repulsive in the thought that literature could be created by any ordinary human being, still to be seen walking the streets, wearing quite commonplace trousers and coat and looking not so unlike a chauffeur or a farmer. Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Lewis’ Nobel Prize address caused a huge uproar when it was reprinted in newspapers in the United States.

But as Liberace once put it, Lewis laughed all the way to the bank.

Recipients of the Nobel Prize receive a large monetary award; hundreds of thousands in Lewis’ time, now nearly $1 million.

When reporters asked what was he going to do with all that money, Lewis quipped that he would use it to support a young American author — himself.

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Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and listening…

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