THEY are the ghosts of Christmas past and present: the barely considered wordsmiths whose lines adorn the time-honoured favourite carols that coax even the most vocally timid of us into a wintry warble. Most of us, however, have a passing acquaintance with one story. On Christmas Eve, 1818, an Austrian Catholic priest, Josef Mohr (1792–1848), took verses he’d penned to his friend Franz Gruber, hoping the schoolmaster-musician could conjure an accompanying tune for that evening’s Midnight Mass in the Alpine village of Oberndorf. Gruber could and Stille Nacht—Silent Night— duly made its debut, apparently with guitar accompaniment, given an ailing church organ.
However, a host of other lyricists are now shadowy characters at best, many of them clerics, many of them Americans. Take the Revd Phillips Brooks (1835–93), who came up with in 1868 when he was rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. Brooks found fame via his sermon at Harvard’s 1865 commemoration of American Civil War dead. Later that year, perhaps seeking solace after the conflict, he headed for
