On Christmas Eve 1818, Austrian priest Josef Mohr asked his church organist Franz Gruber to set a poem he had written to music. That evening during the Christmas Eve service ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ had it’s first ever performance. The first English translation of the song, ‘Stilly Night, Holy Night’ was made in 1858 by Emily Elliott. Elliott was the daughter of an English clergyman, who started off writing hymns for her father’s church and went on to publish extensively under the pen name E. S. Elliott. A year later in America, Episcopal priest John Freeman Young published what has become the most commonly sung English-language translation.

This is the first recording of ‘Silent Night’, made in 1912 on Edison’s Blue Amberol, performed by soprano Elizabeth Spencer, tenor Harry Anthony and baritone James F. Harrison, accompanied by the Venetian Instrumental Quartet. The Edison Phonograph Monthly, a trade publication for the burgeoning market of recorded music, describes the trio number as ‘unsurpassed for beauty of harmony.’ In 1912 Christmas music hasn’t quite yet found it’s niche marketing value. Instead it’s classified as ‘sacred music’ and sits alongside a varied selection that includes opera, instrumental and popular band selections – advertised as a ‘great pot-pourri of Phonographic entertainment’.

A mere two years after this recording, on Christmas Day in 1914, British, French and German soldiers are said to have sung the carol in their respective languages during the famous World War I Christmas truce. 

You can listen to a larger selection of early wax cylinder Christmas songs put together on our Sound Cloud playlist Songs for Christmas.