Silent night! Holy night!

b Salzburg, Austria 1792, d Wagrein, Austria 1848. Brought up by foster parents including an RC priest, he sang as a choirboy in Salzburg Cathedral. He went on to be ordained (RC) in 1815 and following a period of ill health as a hospital patient in Salzburg he served for 2 years at the new St Nicholas’ Ch in Oberndorf, his first and most famous appointment. After work in several other parishes he became Vicar of Hintersee (from 1828) and finally of Wagrein, where he remained from 1837 until his death. We know him as a singer and guitarist, but most widely for the text of his enduring carol. See also Silent Night, Holy Night, ed A Schmaus and L Kriss-Rettenbeck, Innsbruck, 1968. A great number of English translations are available including a ‘forgotten’ one beginning ‘Stilly night, starry and bright’ by F W Farrar (1831–1903) in 1881. A vividly pictorial memorial tablet commemorates him in the Oberndorf church. No.377.

b Pittston, Maine, USA 1820, d New York 1885. Wesleyan Univ, Middletown, Connecticut. He then joined the Protestant Episcopal (Anglican) Church, training at the Virginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria; ordained in 1845. After parish ministry at Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Florida, he served in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana between 1848 and 1855, then for 12 years at Trinity Parish, New York City. In 1867 he was elected as the 2nd Bishop of Florida, remaining in that post until his death from pneumonia while visiting New York. He was a keen supporter of new church building projects in his diocese and state, and of educational advances such as the schools he founded for boys in Jacksonville and girls in Fernandina. At the end of the civil war he shared in the re-opening of the Univ of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. While at Trinity, New York, he published Hymns and Music for the Young (1860–61); his Great Hymns of the Church appeared posthumously in 1887. But his main claim to distinction rests on his world-famous translation of the German carol included here; see notes. No.377.