Endless Night

In the summer of 2025, Dr. Beth Willer mentioned how she’d always wanted a version of Silent Night in a style similar to Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach for her chamber choir, Lorelei Ensemble. As a huge fan of that piece and its arranger, I said, “I’ll just do it for you.” A few weeks later, I delivered an arrangement of the most famous verse from Gruber’s original tune sort of “smeared” in a fashion similar to the Nystedt. Due to Lorelei’s one-on-a-part nature, the phrases had to be much more precise and tightly controlled to account for each singer’s breathing so, where the Norwegian composer’s Bach interpretation just lists the “Komm, süßer Tod” chorale and basically just says “have five choirs sing this at different speeds,” my piece is fully notated for each of the four SA choirs.

I used a version of the tune based on the oldest known score, which dates to around 1820; two years after Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht was originally composed. This autograph manuscript, written in the lyricist’s own hand, was discovered in 1995 and is a bit different in the fifth phrase—the first “Sleep in heavenly peace!”—than the one we most commonly hear today. However, I liked it for this style of arrangement because the very subtle change makes the ear prick up a bit (and doesn’t sound as shouty as the more familiar version as the melody rises into the upper range of the singer).

-Joshua Shank