In 1847, the parish priest in a small French town asked Placide Cappeau a commissionaire of wines to pen a poem for Christmas mass. While traveling in a dusty coach down a bumpy road to Frances capital city, Placide Cappeau used the gospel of Luke as his guide. He imagined witnessing the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Thoughts of being present on the blessed night inspired him. By the time he arrived in Paris, Cantique de Noel had been completed. Moved by his own work, Cappeau decided that his Cantique de Noel was not just a poem, but a song in need of a master musicians hand so he turned to one of his friends, Adolphe Charles Adams, for help. Adolphe was a famed composer, however this project would have been extremely difficult...he was a Jew and the words of the poem represented a day he didnt celebrate and a man he did not view as the son of God. Nevertheless, Adams finished the work and his song was performed just three weeks later at a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Initially, Cantique de Noel was wholeheartedly accepted by the church in France and the song quickly found its way into various Christmas services. But when Placide Cappeau walked away from the church and became a part of the socialist movement, and church leaders discovered that Adolphe Adams was a Jew, the song--which had quickly grown to be one of the most beloved Christmas songs in France--was suddenly and uniformly denounced by the church because of its lack of musical taste and total absence of the spirit of religion. A decade later a reclusive American writer --John Sullivan Dwight--felt that this wonderful Christmas song needed to be introduced to America Dwight strongly identified with the lines of the third verse: Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother; and in his name all oppression shall cease. Legend has it that on Christmas Eve 1871, in the midst of fierce fighting between the armies of Germany and France, during the Franco-Prussian War, a French soldier suddenly jumped out of his muddy trench. He lifted his eyes to the heavens and sang, O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining, It is the night of the dear Saviors birth. The story goes that the fighting stopped for the next twenty-four hours while the men on both sides observed a temporary peace in honor of Christmas day. But theres more...Adams had been dead for many years and Cappeau and Dwight were old men when on Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden--a 33-year-old university professor and former chief chemist for Thomas Edison--did something long thought impossible. Using a new type of generator, Fessenden spoke into a microphone and, for the first time in history, a mans voice was broadcast over the airwaves: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed, ...Shocked radio operators on ships and astonished wireless owners at newspapers sat slack-jawed as their normal, coded impulses, heard over tiny speakers, were interrupted by a professor reading from the gospel of Luke...After finishing his recitation of the birth of Christ, Fessenden picked up his violin and played O Holy Night, the first song ever sent through the air via radio waves. When the carol ended, so did the broadcast--but not before music had found a new medium that would take it around the world. Since that first rendition at a small Christmas mass in 1847, O Holy Night has been sung millions of times in churches in every corner of the world. This incredible work--requested by a forgotten parish priest, written by a poet who would later split from the church, given soaring music by a Jewish composer, and brought to Americans to serve as much as a tool to spotlight the sinful nature of slavery as tell the story of the birth of a Savior--has become one of the most beautiful, inspired pieces of music ever created. #trcampbell #newlifekc #newlifecitychurch Love David Phelps singing this
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 18:56:06 +0000
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