Cantique de Noel

Adolphe Adam set Placide Cappeau's poem Minuit, chrétiens in 1847, at the request of the parish of Roquemaure in the Gard, where a new church organ had just been installed; the singer Emily Laurey gave the first performance at midnight mass there that Christmas. Cappeau was a wine merchant and a freethinker, and part of the French clergy later objected to the piece on those grounds. John Sullivan Dwight made the English version, O Holy Night, in 1855, sharpening the third verse to serve American abolitionist argument.