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Piano sheet music for kids · Carol · Level 5: A wider range
Silent Night
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 6/8, 12 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
Franz Gruber’s 1818 carol, in 6/8 time: two slow beats in each bar, each worth a dotted crotchet, which gives it its rocking lullaby feel. The hand starts with the thumb on E and the first figure is a dotted quaver and a semiquaver, “Si-lent”, long-short. In bars 3, 9 and 10 the tune climbs above the hand to D, E and F, and in bars 11 and 12 it walks all the way down to the low C, so the hand has to move. The left hand plays a bass note then a chord on the two big beats, using C, F and G7.
Practice tip: Learn the shape “G A G, E” first: it comes four times. In bars 9 and 10 (“Sleep in heav-en-ly peace”) move the hand up so that finger 5 can reach the high F, then bring it back down for the last line.
The words
Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. Round yon virgin mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.
A short history
Joseph Mohr, a young priest in the Austrian village of Oberndorf near Salzburg, wrote the poem “Stille Nacht” in 1816. On Christmas Eve 1818 he asked the village schoolmaster and organist, Franz Xaver Gruber, to set it to music for two voices, choir and guitar, and the two men sang it that night at Mass in the church of St Nicholas.
Travelling folk singers from the Tyrol, the Rainer and Strasser families, carried the song around Europe and to America in the 1820s and 1830s, and for decades it was printed as a Tyrolean folk song with no composer named. The English words used here were written in 1859 by John Freeman Young, an American Episcopal priest in New York.
Soldiers on both sides sang it across the trenches during the Christmas truce of 1914, and in 2011 Austria had it listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Franz Xaver Gruber, 1818
- Words
- Joseph Mohr, 1816; English by John Freeman Young, 1859
- Key
- C major
- Time signature
- 6/8
- Length
- 12 bars
- Tempo
- Gently, dotted crotchet = 50
- Difficulty
- Level 5: A wider range (piece 172 of 201)
- Type
- Carol
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
Questions and answers
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