The Story of Silent Night (6 page)

Wagrain today is a ski resort in the Niedere Tauern in the shadow of the Arlberg, gay, light-hearted, colourful with its hotels, chalets and winter slopes alive with tourists and holidaymakers. In the early part of the nineteenth century it was a collection of a few peasant huts and cowsheds and a small, poor chapel that could not even boast one of the more affluent onion-topped towers. It was also the end of the line for Joseph Mohr, the restless, soldier’s bastard and priest with the soul of a poet.

After having wandered for some ten years from parish to parish, he came there at last as Vicar in the year 1828 and remained for twenty years.

He departed as destitute as he had been born, for it was noted that he left nothing behind but a worn and much darned soutane and his prayer book. There was not even money enough to bury him; he was interred at the expense of his community. All that is remembered of him is that he was loved, that the early fires of his youth subsided; he tended his flock, comforted the sick, presided at baptisms, marriages and deaths, instructed the young and served his parish of stolid country folk to the best of his ability. His only pleasure was an occasional night in the
Bierstube
with the cowmen, but as the years dragged on he sang less. Always weak in the chest, in the winter of 1848 he was called to administer the last rites to a dying woman on a distant farm. Returning home he caught cold, pneumonia followed and he died.

Not so much as a badly executed oil, or even a pencil sketch of him existed when fame finally found him. And when at last in 1912, they went to exhume his poor remains to place his skull in the hands of a sculptor to enable the artist to reproduce something of what he might have looked like, for a bust destined to appear in a memorial chapel, not even his grave could be located. The cemetery had fallen into neglect; tombstones had been overturned or made illegible by harsh winter storms and there was nothing to denote remembrance of Mohr. Careful research and enquiry was necessary from still living old people who finally identified the spot.

Franz Gruber was more fortunate. For twenty-five years he was a square peg in a round hole, a musician compelled to serve as schoolteacher, while exercising his real profession only when doubling as organist.

In 1833, however, he succeeded to the post of director of the choir and organist of the principal church in Hallein, a thriving market town on the river Salzach not far south of Salzburg. There he lived the not uncomfortable life of the bourgeois professional man whose compositions were achieving performances. He sired twelve children, of whom two surviving sons and daughters did him honour by following in his footsteps with musical talent.

His, at least, was not wholly a voice crying out in the desert. He was heard. He wrote music, Masses, chorales and scored them for instruments; they were occasionally sung and played. He had increased both the size of his puddle and his own stature therein. He was a man worth the efforts of a painter and both a portrait of him in middle life and photographs taken in old age survive. He died in Hallein in 1865, at the age of seventy-eight.

Were these two men ever aware during this time of the resurgence of the creation of that long-ago Christmas Eve? There is evidence that its appearance in one or another of the song books came to the attention of both Mohr and Gruber. Yet neither of them ever of their own volition laid claim to authorship.

here are two stories told of the eventual disclosure of the real authors of
Silent Night.
One is in all likelihood apocryphal. It relates how the King of Saxony, intrigued by the anonymity of the carol and suspecting the song to be of more modern composition than the composers to whom it was attributed, sent his
Hofkapellmeister
as a musical detective through Saxony and Austria making enquiries at every little village church or musical group. Eventually he was supposed to have tracked down Herr Gruber in Hallein and embraced him, calling him master and genius. Unhappily there is no evidence to bear it out.

Far more endearing is the other and probably true tale, involving yet another Royal Person, His Majesty King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, in which certain facts are documented. Also it involves what might appear to be a stretch of the long arm of coincidence. This was one of the kind which may not be used in fiction but actually every so often takes place in life.

Late in 1854, choir director P. Ambrosius Prennsteiner of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Peter in Salzburg, which was also a famous music school for the training of choirboys and choristers, sat in his office close by the extensive music library and studied a letter passed on to him by the Abbot. It was a request from the
Kapellmeister
of the King’s orchestra in Berlin for a copy of the score of the Christmas song
Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
by Michael Haydn, if one were available. His Royal Master had heard the song and wished it performed on Christmas Eve. It was understood that Herr Haydn, younger brother of Franz Joseph, had written this hymn and since for forty-three years up until his death in 1806, he had been employed as
Kapellmeister
in Salzburg, where he had written more than three hundred and fifty compositions for the church, the original orchestration might be preserved there.

Father Ambrosius did not relish the prospect of searching through voluminous bundles of scores or
Partituren.
Nor did he remember a song by that name amongst those of the younger Haydn. However, the request of his honourable colleague in Berlin called for a reply.

There were a number of choirboys and students working in the library and the Choirmaster summoned one of them into his office. “You, Gruber, come here a moment.”

Coincidental? Only perhaps in the accidental choice of the boy summoned. The children of Franz Gruber of Hallein were talented and one of the youngest, Felix, who later became a teacher and Professor of music, had been sent to school in St. Peter’s in Salzburg for training. His presence there on that date is a matter of record.

The monk handed over the letter to him saying, “Here, read this
—Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht
!— Go and look through all the works we have of Michael Haydn and see if you can find it.”

Young Felix Gruber read through the letter and gave a snort, “Huh! Michael Haydn never wrote that song. My father did.”

The Choirmaster looked shocked. “What’s that you’re saying? Your father? Oh, come now, Gruber!” For he took it to be boyish boasting. He knew of Franz Gruber and his reputation as a competent enough musician who had yet to produce a work of a calibre to be attributed to a member of the great Haydn family.

“But he did,” the boy insisted. “Because we all know about it in the family. Papa wrote it years ago before I was born, before he went to Hallein, with a friend of his—a priest, when the organ broke down. They sang it on Christmas Eve with father playing the accompaniment on his guitar. Nobody had ever done that in a church before.”

The monk was in a quandary. This was no idle boasting, the boy spoke with simple conviction. He said, “Are you sure about this, Felix? Why if he—and you say a priest—wrote a song of sufficient importance to be ascribed to Michael Haydn and rate a performance by the
Hofkapelle
in Berlin, has he never claimed his rights?”

The boy replied, “No one ever asked him. Once a new song book came to our house and Silent Night was in it ascribed to ‘Authors Unknown’. Papa just laughed, and then said they couldn’t even get the notes right.”

“Mmm,” said the Choirmaster, “Well then, if what you say is true, perhaps your father should be the one to deal with this, eh? If, indeed, he wrote the song he ought to be able to make them a copy.” And he threw a sharp glance at the student. If he were exaggerating, or even telling a lie this would be most certain to bring it to light.

But young Gruber was not in the least taken aback. “Yes, sir,” he said, “I’m sure he’d be pleased to do so. Will you send him the letter?”

Father Ambrosius was satisfied. It seemed an excellent way to kill two birds with one stone. The request of the
Herr Kapellmeister
would be honoured and if Michael Haydn was wrongfully being credited with the work of a contemporary composer living less than a dozen kilometres down the river south of Salzburg, well then, it was time that this obvious injustice was corrected.

Not long after, the Director of His Majesty the King of Prussia’s orchestra in Berlin was surprised to receive a packet from Hallein in Austria, a town he had never heard of before. It contained a sheet of music entitled,
Weihnachtslied
, but scored for full orchestral accompaniment: strings, flute, bassoon, clarinet, French horn and organ. Enclosed with it was a letter containing exactly the same modest, third person, factual account of its composition that Gruber later wrote for his family, beginning:

“It was on the 24th December of the year 1818, that the incumbent assistant priest, Joseph Mohr of St. Nikola’s Church in Oberndorf, handed over a poem to the organist of that church, Franz Gruber . . .”

ruber’s version was produced on Christmas Eve to His Majesty’s great satisfaction and every Christmas thereafter, until the King became incapacitated. But if there was so much as a thank-you note from Berlin’s
Kapellmeister
it has not been preserved either in the family of Gruber’s descendants or the archives of the little Gruber museum in Hallein. Song books and publishers merrily continued to credit verses and melody to the unknown recorder of Austrian or Tyrolean folk music.

It was not until 1867 that an Austrian printer, Durlicher, published a handbook on Pongau, that district of the Niedere Tauern Alps embracing St. Johann and Wagrain, in which the then resident priest of the latter village states that Joseph Mohr, his predecessor, wrote the words to
Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
and Franz Gruber of Hallein, the music.
This was the first ever written acknowledgement of either.
And by this time both men were dead.

In the meantime their innocent Christmas lullaby took flight and girdled the world.

It became a thing of extraordinary power with a life of its own. Besides the fifty or more languages of Europe, it spoke in every foreign tongue from Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil to Philippine Tagalog and Ethiopian, from Kurdish, Turkish and Japanese to a dozen African tribal dialects. Christian Arabs, Malays, Chinese, Australian aborigines and Eskimos began to sing it. It was heard in Catholic cathedrals and Protestant churches.

The Rainer family had first taken it to the New World, but it was the German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century, escaping from religious persecution, who spread it far and wide over the Republic of the American States. For when they fled they carried their song books tucked into their meagre baggage. On Christmas Eve on the high seas, in the foetid holds of immigrant sailing ships, families brought out their accordions and zithers and lifted their voices in the song that was bound up with the tenderest memories of all they had left behind.

They scattered north, south and west and the German Christmas with its festive tree, their customs and their music went with them. Once more Silent Night was on the move.

It was heard in the cold bivouacs during the Civil War when for the Yule night North and South called truce and the fraternal enemies across the trenches joined their voices.

The melody was plucked from the banjos of the pioneers westward bound, camped within the circle of their covered wagons. It was chorused by the slaves on Southern plantations and played on a mouth organ by a lonely cowpoke riding fence on his tired cayuse, with the stars of Christmas night drawn like a mantle about his shoulders.

Missionaries took it across the Pacific to the islands of the South Seas, to Indonesia, the Malay peninsula, the Empire of Japan and the walled cities of China. In the packs of Franciscans, Jesuits, Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, it penetrated Africa. The Eskimos heard it from the trappers and traders. In the west this simple creation extended its sway over agnostic and atheist, as well as Christian and Theist.

And along with the wild-fire spread of the carol and at last its acknowledgement as the work of a nineteenth-century Austrian priest and Bavarian-born organist and schoolteacher, there came screeching, trumpeting and squalling, a rag-tag and bobtail gaggle of carpers and critics who attacked not only the song, but its authors from every possible angle. They tore into the work and demonstrated first that neither Mohr nor Gruber could have written it. Then with equal facility they proved that they did, but plagiarized it from an earlier Latin verse and a folk melody originating in the vicinity of Hochburg, Gruber’s birthplace.