The Story of Silent Night

by Paul Gallico

  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 astonis
hed. “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.”

  Fat Frau Schneider reflected. The church was full of corners, crannies and chests. She suggested, “There would only be that old closet behind the vestry where he used to keep his clothes and his guitar.”

  “If you like,” Gruber offered, “I’ll have a look.” A moment later they heard him shout, “Ha!” as amidst old bits of paper, half-written scores and hymnbooks without covers, crumpled and dusty, he retrieved the manuscript of the poem and music.

  Returning, he handed it to the organ-mender who placed it on the music rack before him, pulled out the stop of the vox humana and tentatively fingered the melody, his lips moving as he read the words.

  “You see,” said Gruber, “it’s nothing.”

  “We-ell,” Mauracher replied, and showed his teeth through his bushy beard in a curious kind of smile, “Wait!” He eyed the score once more, then began opening stops until he had activated the whole noble range of the pipes. He threw back his massive head and with an accompaniment as though rendered by an orchestra of flutes, viols and trumpets, filled the church with the hymn until the beams of the roof shivered.

  He grinned at Gruber. “It has something, hasn’t it, old fellow?”

  Gruber laughed. “YOU have something, my dear master. You could make a five-finger exercise sound like a Handel Hallelujah.”

  Mauracher said, “You might let me have a copy.”

  Gruber only laughed again and said, “Take it with you, if you like. No one here will have any further use for it, since you have mended our organ so perfectly.”

  Mauracher nodded, stuffed the score inside his coat pocket, shouldered his bag of tools and patches and climbed onto the driver’s seat of his wagon. “If the Elders should decide upon a new organ,” he shouted as he drove off, “don’t forget us,” waved and Gruber watched him out of sight, and along with the only extant score of Silent Night, out of mind.

  hen, some three months later, Mauracher returned to Fügen, the incident had dimmed, overshadowed by other events of his trip: an order for a great new organ to be built along the most modern lines, plus more news of the world outside of their valley, the political troubles brewing in the north, in Saxony and Brandenburg.

  He came upon the crumpled score once more among his papers when he unpacked. He meant to show it to the choirmaster; he meant to play it for his wife and children; he meant even sometime to make an organ transcription along the lines of his improvisation. But as so often happens, life and the immediate took over. The song was not heard from again for three years.

  In the year 1822, Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria and Czar Alexander I of Russia, during one of those political intimacies which in the Europe of the nineteenth century were to spell life or death for so many marching infantrymen, came to Fügen as guests at the castle of Count Ludwig von Donhoff. And one evening the Count had some of the locals up to entertain his Royal visitors. Amongst these were the family Rainer, the precursors of today’s famous Austrian Trapp Family singers. In their repertoire was Silent Night. Their Majesties were delighted, so much so that the Czar invited the singers to St. Petersburg.

  And here, strangely, the flame dies out again for ten more years.

  It is said that the Rainers continued to spread the song and even took it with great success to America. Yet they do not appear again in its strange career. Perhaps their function was solely to receive it at some time or other from the hands of Karl Mauracher, maybe at one of those moments of violent spring cleaning, where Frau Mauracher tackling the mess of manuscripts in a cupboard threatened to throw the lot out unless her husband did something about them. Thus the song would have come to his attention again and he could have passed it to this group.

  Yet the ears and the hearts of people might still have been unprepared. It is quite possible that had the song been published then, it might never have accomplished that for which it was destined.

  Silent Night was next heard from through another family, the Geschwister Strasser, a quartet consisting of two brothers and two sisters from Laimach in the Zillertal. Laimach and Fügen are neighbours and again we are back in the Tyrol.

  In addition to their yodelling and peasant Schuhplattler dance, which included a great deal of stamping and rump slapping, the Tyroleans were famous throughout Teutonic Europe as the fountain head of Austrian folk-song. They were both a fashion and a fad and when they appeared in their native costume and sang their sentimental mountain songs, they were received enthusiastically. Everyone in the Tyrol seemed to sing. And here again one faces the mystery of design. Would the song have caught on ever by itself if rediscovered as the creation of two unknown men? Or was it the fact that it made its bow to Europe as a Tyrolean Folksong, “Authors Unknown” that gave it its initial impetus, the appeal of something primeval?

  It would remain “Authors Unknown” where Silent Night was concerned for some forty years or more following its creation. Yet the names of the Strasser Quartet have come down to us. The two girls were Amalie and Karoline, the boys Andreas and Pepi. They were not professional singers like the Rainers, but glove makers. Some of the finest chamois and kidskin gloves were exported from the Tyrol to the great annual Leipzig Summer Fair. When the Strassers brought their winter’s work there, the Gesckwister would earn a little extra money by giving modest concerts of Tyrolean folksongs. And by then Silent Night was in their repertoire too. It had become a native creation, belonging neither to Mauracher (if he remembered) nor the Rainers, but to the country. Authors would only have been an embarrassment to authenticity.

  They sang it for the first time in Leipzig at a small affair in 1831 as one of a group of four indigenous carols. A new character in the design made a brief appearance, Franz Ascher, organist of the Royal Saxon Court Orchestra. He was in the audience, found the song enchanting and invited the quartet to return the following year in December and sing it at the Christmas Mass which would be held in the Royal Chapel at Pleisenburg nearby.

  The family was delighted to accept such an honour. The thrifty glove manufacturers worked hard on a consignment for Christmas sale and the four singers arranged and advertised a concert of their own the same month in the ballroom of the Hotel Pologne. The notice appeared in the Leipziger Tagesblatt, where it triggered an anonymous letter, another strand in the fine skein that was being woven. Had one single thread been severed . . . ?

  “Greatly Honoured Sirs:

  “Having seen the announcement in your valued newspaper pertaining to the concert of the Gesckwister Strasser from the Tyrol, might it be in order respectfully to request them to include the little Weihnachtslied “Stille Nacht” in their programme. I had the pleasure of listening to them sing it last year and would enjoy hearing it again.

  “Yours faithfully,

  “AN ADMIRER.”

  The four were delighted to comply. It was added publicity and guaranteed them at least one paid admission. But it was not a question of one, but of how many could be packed into the hall. It was an ideal seasonal entertainment and an opportunity to hear the quartet known to have been invited to sing in the King’s chapel.

  And now the time, the place and the audience were right, with one more important character waiting in the wings for his cue to enter the story and play his part.

  Once more, the four Strassers, the girls fresh-faced, their dark hair looped in braids about their heads, clad in bright coloured dirndls with contrasting aprons, the boys in green trousers, foresters’ jackets and frilled shirts, blended their voices in their
rendition of their Tyrolean Christmas song. Only this time it was different.

  For it was Christmas time that night, without and within and this was, amongst other things, not a church but a concert hall. The Christmas spirit was abroad. In the homes there was the smell of roasting goose, sugared fruits, Lebkuchen and Weihnachtsstollen, the traditional holiday cakes, pine boughs and hollyberries. It was the time of mysterious comings and goings behind closed doors, packages and the whisperings of excited children. For the Germans it was the most endearing and sentimental season of the year.

  As for that important player who had been awaiting his summons? He was already there in the fourth row, sitting spellbound. His name was Anton Friese and he was a Dresden music publisher in Leipzig briefly on business. To while away the last evening before returning to his home and holiday celebration with his family he had on impulse, as he passed the Hotel, purchased a ticket and taken his seat.

  Perhaps it was the very urban smartness and sophistication of the members of the audience in the face of the unexpected that enabled the simple song to pierce directly to their hearts, evoke long forgotten memories of childhood, of innocent days spent in the little villages and farms of their youth. It had a nostalgia that seemed to bring back all the love and tenderness of Christmases past to combine with that of their own children of the present.

  When the last note had died away the audience sat silent, still enchained by the mixture of emotions evoked. Then the pent up feeling overflowed into a storm of applause and the quartet was compelled to repeat the number. And this time Herr Friese was ready. For at the first hearing he had been too overwhelmed by the thoughts and recollections the song had aroused in him to do more than listen and know that his eyes were moist.