Joseph Mohr, assistant priest at the Church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf bei Salzburg, had written the poem 'Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!' in six stanzas two years earlier, in 1816, at Mariapfarr. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1818 he walked the two miles to Arnsdorf to see Franz Xaver Gruber, the schoolmaster and organist for both villages, with a request: the Oberndorf church organ was out of action (the traditional local explanation is a mouse-eaten bellows; the more probable cause is river flooding), and he needed a setting playable on guitar for the midnight Mass that night.
Gruber composed the melody in a few hours. That evening — 24 December 1818 — Mohr and Gruber sang it together at the Christmas Eve Mass, with Mohr accompanying on guitar and the Oberndorf choir joining on the refrain. It was, so far as the parish records show, the only performance of the hymn until at least 1825.
"The song was carried out of the Tyrolean valleys by the folk-singing Strasser and Rainer families in the 1830s and reached the United States in 1839 when the Rainer Family Singers performed it at the Alexander Hamilton Memorial outside Trinity Church, New York. By 1859 it had been translated into English by John Freeman Young (bishop of Florida) as 'Silent Night, Holy Night'."
On the night of 24–25 December 1914, in the trenches near Ypres, unarmed German soldiers began singing 'Stille Nacht' from their forward positions; British soldiers of the Second Battalion Queen's Westminster Rifles answered with the English words. The 1914 Christmas Truce spread along a stretch of the Western Front and lasted, in places, into Boxing Day.
The original Oberndorf church was destroyed by flooding of the Salzach in the 1890s. A small octagonal Stille-Nacht-Kapelle stands on the site; the hymn is performed there every Christmas Eve at 5 p.m.