The Story of Silent Night Page 4

  Extracting a pencil from his pocket, he turned over his programme which had merely listed, “TYROLEAN CHRISTMAS FOLKSONG. Authors Unknown”, and on the back drew the five lines in treble clef. As he listened for the second time he jotted down the words and in a kind of of musical shorthand of his own, captured the notes of the melody as well.

  That night at his hotel, he transcribed the entire song perfectly—or, that is to say, almost perfectly except for one or two slight lapses of memory that were to irritate the composer in the years to come and eventually supplant the original.

  The Christmas song returned with him to Dresden and in 1840 appeared for the first time in print, published by Friese under the title, Four genuine Tyrolean songs sung by The Brothers and Sisters Strasser from the Zillertal. It was scored for four voices and there was a second version for piano and single voice. This was fine publicity for the Strassers, as well as giving the song authenticity and cachet. (What the family Rainer had to say about this is not recorded.) Shortly after it was noted in a Catholic song book and then was glibly pirated from collection to collection. In 1844 it had travelled to Berlin where it was published by Finck in Musical Home Treasures of the Germans, thence lifted to Dr. Gebhardt’s Musical Youth’s Friend, and in 1848 to the same publisher’s Musical School Friend, but always credited as a Tyrolean or Austrian folksong of unknown origin.

  In all likelihood the Strassers never knew who had written it and Herr Mauracher had either forgotten or at the time he handed it over to the Rainers, did not deem it important. And since no name appeared on the original manuscript there would have been no source to check.

  And now the song began to travel from Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin; like a stone thrown into a placid pool, the circles made by the modest hymn spread ever wider. It went south from Frankfurt, Mannheim and Stuttgart, north to Hanover and Hamburg and crossed the borders of the Low Countries to Utrecht and Amsterdam. Prague and Vienna knew it and it was heard as close to its original home as Salzburg.

  On Christmas Eve when the candles of the tree were lit, it was sung by families in humble homes and in the proud courts of Dukes, Princes and Electors. The village choir sang it to organ accompaniment and it began to be performed as well at the Mass celebrating Christ’s birth in the big cathedrals of Europe.

  And now that it was becoming so familiar, interest in its origins had been roused and it was being ascribed variously to Kaspar Aiblinger, the Bavarian court conductor and church composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and his younger brother Michael Haydn, and a number of other well-known contemporary musicians.

  uring this time how fared the two men who actually had written it?

  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 student
s 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.

  In 1897, George Weber, Kapellmeister of Mainz cathedral, attacked the song as lacking the slightest indication of either Christian or any other religious thought, as doing injury to the beliefs and Christian feeling with regard to the Holy Mary and the Holy Foster Father to designate them as a wedded pair. He condemned the entire poem as more fit for a Punch and Judy show. The music he characterized as completely monotone without emotional content, refinement or interesting themes. Lumped together he dismissed the whole business as tasteless, cheap and sentimental slush.

  Defenders arose to say that Mohr and Gruber had never intended to produce a great work of art, and its faults could be forgiven on the score of their simplicity. The Gruber family took a hand, reacting violently to the further accusation that not Gruber but Mohr himself had written the music to his own verses.

  Into the breach stepped one Andreas Winklers, with a message from an old friend. In a letter to the Salzburg Chronicle this gentleman from Tamsweg wrote:

  “Your Honour:

  “Often invited as a student with others to visit the hospitable and most honourable Herr Vikar Joseph Mohr i
n Wagrain, it used to be our custom when we were stimulated, to toast the poet of Silent Night. He would thank us and declare that one of the happiest moments of his life was when shortly before Christmas of 1818, he said during a meeting with Herr Franz Gruber, ‘Let the two of us put together something for Christmas Eve. And that’s exactly what happened. I wrote the text and Franz Gruber the melody.’ Those were the never varying words of Vikar Mohr.”

  The critics persisted. Professors of music, organists, orchestra leaders, composers, lexicographers, writers, literary bigwigs and long-nosed bigots joined in the fray throughout Germany and Austria denigrating the efforts of two unpretentious men who had not profited by so much as a single sou, who had never asked for anything and who never pretended that they had clone anything than the best they could at a particular minor crisis in their lives.

  The only ones who loved what they had wrought, whole-heartedly and unreservedly were people. And they numbered millions. Blackest sin of all against Things As They Ought Not To Be, this love was experienced by unbeliever as well as believer, Muslim, Buddhist and nature worshippers, red, white, yellow, brown and black. It crossed the religious lines of the Christian whites as well as the infidel and became a symbol of the one day of the year dedicated to peace on earth and good will to men.

  The power of this random collection of words and musical notations is mysterious, its hold upon so many in the world unfathomable. Christmas is an invention, a solstice of pagan importance now adopted to commemorate the birth of a God as determined by Canon Law, and so it is celebrated with service, with prayer and music, hymns, carols and invocation of the Divine. This was the purpose for which Silent Night was written.

  What the censorious have found unbearable about it is that in addition to suggesting a picture of a holy and miraculous birth, it gives rise to a host of other emotions, feelings and longings. It has an unexplained underlying sadness and evokes an unsatisfied yearning for the kind of beauty and goodness that in the end always seems to elude us. It is as though we were compelled to look into a mirror to see there the children we once were when first it entered our homes and lives, and to reflect upon what we have become. For even as some of the critics have bitterly complained, more than a religious song it is a picture of a family idyll.