The Story of Silent Night (4 page)

Gruber and Mohr, however, stationed themselves outside the door of St. Nikola’s to greet the emerging Oberndorfers. The reactions were mixed.

The wife of a Selectman gushed, “It was a lovely service, Father, but we did miss our music, didn’t we?”

An elderly woman, tight-lipped, remarked, “Really, Father, it seems to me that church is not the place for playing a guitar.”

One of the sailors gave the young priest a dig in the ribs, “Not bad, but we could have done with something a bit more lively, eh?”

A man complimented Gruber, “That was a nice melody. But haven’t I heard it before somewhere?”

Another family stopped to say, “Thank you, Father, How pretty the children looked.”

Gruber remained somewhat cynically amused, but on the whole pleased for the majority of the comments indicated that they had managed to get away with it. He murmured to Mohr, “So far, so good. But I don’t think old Nostler was very pleased. I hope there won’t be any trouble.”

Mohr laughed and replied, “Oh, he’ll get over it!”

When the last of the worshippers had dispersed behind the clouds of their own breath in the night air, Gruber wryly held out his hand to his friend and said, “Merry Christmas, Joseph!”

The intonation was not lost upon the priest who grinned back at him impishly, “The same to you, Franzl.”

The two men shook hands and Gruber set off for Arnsdorf and home once more, still smiling gently beneath the muffler now wound about his face to the eyes.

A few days later, as the townspeople began to look ahead to the coming new year and what it might hold for them, the incident and the song to which it had given rise were totally forgotten.

he verdict of time upon manifestations of genius is unpredictable. Works by creators in every field of the arts who at some moment or other feel that they are inspired and have produced something immortal, languish rejected by critic and public alike. Trifles tossed off to pay a bill, to amuse a child or even efforts about to be discarded because they seem ordinary or unworthy often achieve imperishable fame.

Franz Gruber was for his day a competent journeyman musician who, when he died, left behind some ninety compositions mostly of a religious nature and as modest, unpretentious and undistinguished as himself.

Each time he sat at his spinet, clavichord or pianoforte during his life’s span, he set out to write the very best music he could. All contained some of the essence of the man, his dreams, his imagination, his hopes for survival. Yet of these major productions, but one Mass for mixed chorus and small orchestra is still occasionally heard in Germany today. During his lifetime he once rose above himself and soared like a lark upon one heavenly and never-to-be-forgotten flight. And when he put together a simple melody, he was wholly unaware that he had created anything in the least remarkable.

On the contrary. When some thirty-six years later Gruber was asked for his account of how the song came into being, he wrote in his own hand a few cold, dry-as-dust sentences pertaining to the event:

“It was on the 24th December of the year 1818 that the incumbent assistant priest, Father Joseph Mohr of St. Nikola’s Church in Oberndorf, handed over a poem to the organist of that church, Franz Gruber, who at the same time was also school teacher in Arnsdorf, with the request to write an accompanying melody for two solo voices, chorus with guitar accompaniment. The latter, in accordance with the appropriate request of this holy man who was himself a musician, handed over his simple composition and it was performed that Christmas Eve to general approval.”

Even then, so long after when it had begun to work its magic and the authorship of Silent Night was being attributed to the world’s greatest composers, Gruber was not impressed. He had not even the vanity to use the first person in his meagre narrative but wrote about the church organist Franz Gruber as though he were observing him coldly from a distance. His only reaction to the universal pirating of his song and its appearance designated as “authors unknown” in dozens of publications, was a grumbling that somebody had tampered with two or three bars and changed a few notes. His was simply the approach of a professional musician. For the rest he never deemed it worth bothering about.

Thereafter in that testament he declares: “Mr. Joseph Mohr, who was the author of this poem and many other religious songs, died on the 4th December, 1848, the worthy vicar of Wagrain in Pongau.” And this was all he had to say of his collaborator.

Of the “many other religious songs” of Joseph Mohr, not one has remained. The words of Silent Night have been translated into more than fifty European languages alone, not to mention those of the New World, Asia and Africa.

The priest rather fancied himself as a would-be poet. His friends often teased him and dubbed him poet-jester, and one suspects that perhaps his efforts on most occasions were more doggerel than poesy.

Mohr had been embarrassed when he handed the verses to Gruber, and for a reason of which he was probably not even aware. In the creation of those lines something had happened to him which never had before, and nor ever would again. They had burst from his heart all in one sudden outflowing like a freshet. Another hand seemed to have taken hold of his pen.

Poets often long for inspiration and then when on rare occasions it manifests itself are more than likely to be fearful and mistrustful of it. Mohr was afraid that Gruber might laugh at him when he read what he had written.

And in all probability what held these two men from the realization of what they had wrought was that each saw it only from his own angle and experience, one as a writer and the other as a composer. Each unaware had contributed only half a miracle and therefore saw the whole as nothing miraculous at all. Would Mohr’s verses have survived without Gruber’s composition? Would Gruber’s melody be remembered had it not been for Mohr’s words?

And why and how did this seemingly insignificant song survive at all?

here is a famous old hymn, the first lines of which are:

“God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform.”

And this would indeed seem to be true of the rescue of Silent Night from the oblivion to which it appeared to be consigned, since its original impact upon the world was no greater or more significant than a single grain of sand in a desert.

God seemed to move in a strange and complicated manner to enable this particular little work of liturgical song to live on, to carry its message of love and extraordinary heartache throughout the world. And the first hint was to be found in the closing lines of Gruber’s own account.

This clue was but a passing reference and never would have been included in Gruber’s hard-facts narrative had it not been, as indicated before, that somebody down through the years had tampered with his composition. His only interest was to set the record straight, which he did with a sheet of music which accompanied his story and which is the only extant version today in Gruber’s own hand.

He concluded his statement:

“As this Christmas song came into the Tyrol by means of a well-known Zillertaler and which, however, appeared in a song collection in Leipzig somewhat altered, the author of same has the honour to include herewith a score following the original melody.”

But who was the “well-known Zillertaler”?

He was a virtuoso, maned like a lion, bearded like Jove himself, a large, lusty and powerful personality.

In the town of Fügen in the Zillertal, under the shadow of a jagged, snow-topped range of Tyrolean Alps, lived the Mauracher dynasty, builders of organs.

The Maurachers were not only manufacturers and repairers of the most expensive and important musical instrument of the times, but were also musicians. To build an organ properly, to construct the pipes in perfect pitch, you had to be able to play. Before the newly finished product was despatched to the church for which it was intended, its thunder first rang through the halls of the Fügen factory to the majestic chords of Bach, Handel and Buxtehude.

In the year 1819, the travelling Mauracher was organist Karl and in April when the snows blocking the roads had melted and begun their rush to the sea, and the first purple crocuses confirmed that spring was indeed at hand, he hitched up his team to his wagon. Filling it with his tools, sheets of leather, spare pipes, pedals, stops and wire he clapped his feathered hat upon his massive head, hung his long curved Austrian pipe from his mouth and set off upon his round of visits to churches that had written to complain of sick or disabled organs. And, of course, the Church of St. Nikola at Oberndorf was on his list.

It was not until the middle of May that Karl Mauracher pulled his team to a halt there to be greeted by the hearty,
“Grüss Gott und willkommen!”
of Franz Gruber.

By then Joseph Mohr was no longer there. Whether finally the fulminations of his enemy Father Nostler had their effect in Salzburg, or that his luck had run out is not known. The climate of Oberndorf suited him well and he would have liked to have remained there. But this was not his pattern and he was now at one of the ten insignificant posts he would fill, one after another, before he was finally tucked away for good and all in the oblivion of the tiny mountain village of Wagrain.

Dismounting, Mauracher followed Gruber into the organ loft and gave a great snort as he saw the rip in the bellows. He fetched his tools and settled down to patching it, no doubt letting drop a few words of sales talk and the value of installing a new instrument rather than relying upon one that could suddenly let one down, and at the most inconvenient times.

As a travelling man, the organ-mender brought news too, social and political, from gossip of the neighbouring towns to the uneasy peace that had settled upon Europe now that Napoleon was no longer there to menace it, though there was no telling how long those barbarian Bavarians to the north would remain quiet. Still, times were better; even those Colonial wars in the Americas seemed to have come to an end. He went on to say he had heard that in Vienna Beethoven had completed his Grand Mass in D, and the composer was supposed to be working now on a Ninth Symphony, of all things embodying a chorale. Mauracher had met him once—an unpleasant fellow but unquestionably a good musician.

Gruber listened silently. Arnsdorf and Oberndorf had little or nothing to contribute to the march of events.

The job completed at last, the two men went around from behind the organ loft into the church, where Mauracher seated himself at the console, air was pumped up into the renewed bellows and to the delight of Gruber’s ears a Bach Toccata and Fugue filled the building.

And then suddenly, in the midst of a resounding phrase, Mauracher stopped, turned to Gruber and asked, “When was it you said your damage occurred?”

“The morning of Christmas Eve.”

“I thought that’s what I heard,” said the Tyrolean. “Whatever did you do for music, then?”

This was the first time that anyone had inquired about the now forgotten Christmas Eve musical crisis.

Gruber smiled in recollection. “Well, it was a little unusual. Do you remember Mohr, the chap who was here as assistant priest then? No, I don’t think you ever met him. He was something of a versifier and a musician, too. We both—ah—used to strum the guitar. Well, he wrote a little poem and I set it to music. We sang it with a children’s chorus. It was scored for two male voices—tenor and baritone, that is to say Mohr and myself, with guitar accompaniment. You should have seen the faces of the congregation when we entered the nave. But it seemed to go down well.” And now he smiled again, “At least the whole bizarre business was quickly forgotten.”

Mauracher looked astonished. “What a combination! I never heard of such a thing. I should like to see that.”

“Goodness!” Gruber laughed, “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for it, or where Joseph put it, if it hasn’t been swept out already.
Sagen Sie mal,
Frau Schneider . . .” and here Gruber addressed a stout
Putzfrau,
the cleaning woman who was passing through with her bucket and mop, “Did Father Mohr leave any papers behind anywhere, other than those in the music cupboard? I know it isn’t there, because I only recatalogued our library recently.”