O Holy Night: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"O Holy Night" is the English form of a French Christmas song known as "Minuit, chrétiens" or "Cantique de Noël." Its words are by Placide Cappeau (1808–1877) of Roquemaure, a small town in the Gard department of southern France, whom Benjamin Ivry describes as a wine merchant with leftist politics.^[1][2][3] Sources differ on when he wrote the poem: the Fondation Napoléon places it around 1843, written to mark the completion of works in his parish, while Hymnary.org dates the text to 1847.^[2][1] The music is by Adolphe Adam (1803–1856), the Paris-born composer of more than seventy operas whose lasting reputation rests on the ballet Giselle (1841).^[4] The setting is usually dated 1847, though Ivry notes that contemporary accounts give either 1843 or 1847.^[2][3] According to the Fondation Napoléon, the song was first sung on December 24, 1847, by the singer Emily Laurey.^[2] A 1927 article by Ernest Laut in the Montreal periodical La Lyre, written as an anecdote with dialogue, ties the song's making to a midnight Mass in Roquemaure: in Laut's telling, the parish priest asks Madame Laurey, a friend of Adam's who was staying with her husband as a guest of Cappeau, then the town's mayor, to sing at the service, and she passes the verses on to the composer.^[5]

The Fondation Napoléon notes that the song was heard at the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris on Christmas Eve 1856, and the Quebec musician Ernest Gagnon, then a student in Paris, heard it there the following Christmas; he brought it home in 1858, when a daughter of the judge René-Édouard Caron sang it at midnight Mass in Sillery.^[2][3][6] Church authorities were less enthusiastic. Ivry reports that a French sacred-music journal suggested in 1864 that the piece be dropped, that some clergy objected to its theology, and that a French Catholic reference work of 1956 recorded its removal from many dioceses.^[3] The English version is the work of John Sullivan Dwight, the Boston writer on music who published Dwight's Journal of Music from 1852 to 1881; Ivry dates his translation to 1855.^[1][3] Cappeau's third stanza already speaks of the slave as a brother, and Dwight's English keeps that idea, which Delaney Coyne connects with Dwight's antislavery convictions.^[2][1][7] Hymnary.org lists Dwight's text in 73 hymnals.^[1]

The song also figures in a well-known radio story. Reginald Fessenden's Christmas Eve 1906 transmissions from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, are often credited as radio's earliest programs of entertainment, and the song is said to have been part of that Christmas Eve program. That story is disputed. The only first-hand account appears to be a letter Fessenden wrote in 1932, quoted in Helen Fessenden's 1940 book Builder of Tomorrows, in which he recalls playing "O, Holy Night" on the violin (crediting it to Gounod) and singing one verse; no contemporary account of the broadcast has been found.^[8] Writing in Radio World, James E. O'Neal found nothing beyond that letter to support the claim and concluded that any mention of the 1906 broadcasts needs qualification, while Donna L. Halper, in the same magazine, argues that the lack of press coverage does not prove the event never took place.^[9][10]

Find books with O Holy Night for sale →

Sources

1. Hymnary.org: "O holy night the stars are brightly shining" (text).
2. Fondation Napoléon (Élodie Lefort): "Minuit, Chrétiens".
3. America Magazine (Benjamin Ivry): "A brief history of 'O Holy Night,' the rousing Christmas hymn that garnered mixed reviews".
4. Britannica: "Adolphe Adam".
5. BAnQ, La Lyre (Montréal), December 1927 (Ernest Laut): "Le Noël d'Adam".
6. La Scena Musicale (Jean-Yves Bronze): "The Minuit, Chrétiens in Québec".
7. America Magazine (Delaney Coyne): "The abolitionist history of 'O Holy Night'".
8. United States Early Radio History: "Builder of Tomorrows: First Broadcast extract".
9. Radio World (James E. O'Neal): "Fessenden — The Next Chapter".
10. Radio World (Donna L. Halper): "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden".