In 1847 Placide Cappeau (1808-1877), a French wine merchant and an amateur poet, was asked to write a Christmas poem by a local parish priest. Shortly afterwards Cappeau traveled to Paris on a business trip and about half way through his journey, he had the inspiration for the poem Minuit, Chretiens ("Midnight Christians"). When Cappeau arrived in Paris, he took it to the composer Adolphe Adam (1803-1856), a friend of a friend. Adam, who specialized in light opera, is best remembered today for the ballet Giselle. He wrote the tune in a few days and the hymn was played for the first time at midnight mass that Christmas Eve back in his home town of Roquemaure. The carol was frowned upon by church authorities, who denounced it for lack of musical taste and "total absence of the spirit of religion." Many churchmen felt that Adam, a composer of light operatic works and ballets, was an inappropriate composer of a religious song. However within a few years the carol was being translated into other languages and in 1855, an American Unitarian clergyman John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), the editor of Dwight's Journal of Music, translated it into English, calling it "O Holy Night."
This carol has the distinction of being the first song ever to be played live on a radio broadcast. On December 24, 1906 a Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden, broadcast one of the first ever AM radio programs, and the first ever to feature entertainment and music for a general audience, from his Brant Rock, Massachusetts station. After playing Handel's "Largo" on an Ediphone phonograph, he proceeded to play "O Holy Night" on his violin, singing the last verse as he played. He finished the broadcast by reading various passages from the Gospel of Luke, before wishing his listeners a Merry Christmas.
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