The Story of Silent Night (2 page)

He flicked his coat-tails, adjusted the organ bench and pulled out the stops. Then, with eyes closed and head thrown back in anticipation of the first thunderous chords he would evoke, he trod the bellows pedals and pressed the keys. But no music issued from the pipes, only a soft, breathy sigh. Something was very wrong.

Before Gruber had time to investigate this unhappy phenomenon he heard a sound by the door and turned to see his friend Joseph Mohr, the young priest, himself a musician. Mohr was in Oberndorf on a temporary basis as assistant to Father Joseph Nostler, the permanent priest of St. Nikola, who was out at the time.

Gruber said,
“Grüss Gott,
Joseph,” and then, “Heavens! What’s happened to the organ?”

Mohr—he was then twenty-six, with merry eyes and a gay, boyish air which somehow did not seem to match the long and sombre soutane—raised his arms in a helpless gesture and said, “A catastrophe! Come along and I’ll show you. When old Nostler finds out he’ll blame that on me too.” The priest and his assistant did not get on.

He led Gruber to the loft behind the gilded stand of pipes and pointed to the hole and the rip leading from it in the worn leather bellows. “I discovered it this morning after early Mass, when I sat down to play for myself a little. A mouse must have gnawed a hole during the night; look, there are the droppings. At the first pressure the whole thing gave way. Look how old and rotten it is—it should have been attended to long ago,” and then he added, “It’s hopeless.”

Gruber inspected the damage with genuine anguish. “And the organ-mender won’t be coming up from the Zillertal until the snows have melted in the spring,” he cried.

A Christmas Eve Mass without music was unthinkable. He fingered the split leather and said, “Here’s a fine fix! What’s to be done?”

Rather timidly, as the two men walked back into the church to contemplate the now mute and useless organ, young Father Mohr said, “Well, I had an idea while waiting for you to come, I have written a little poem. Here . . .” and he produced a bit of paper from his soutane and then, coughing and correcting himself, “Well, actually not a poem, perhaps, but some words for a song and it seemed to me that if . . .”

The schoolteacher, startled, said, “A poem?” and then smiling at his friend said, “That doesn’t surprise me. You were always more of a poet than a preacher and a singer, perhaps even more than a poet. Why you ever chose the cloth . . .”

The shy and pleasant expression faded from Mohr’s face as he replied shortly and with grim asperity, “It was chosen for me.” And Gruber regretted his levity, remembering the strange story of the boyhood of this somewhat misfit, itinerant priest whom Fate seemed to send hither and thither to fill any temporary vacancies but never acquiring a parish of his own.

“And besides,” Mohr added, still angry, “it isn’t
that
kind of a song.”

“Of course not,” Gruber soothed his friend, and apologized further, “I meant nothing more than that your talents are numerous.”

But both were aware of what lay behind Mohr’s reference to “that kind of a song”. It was just that it was well known that he enjoyed raising his fine tenor voice with the river men in the wood-panelled
Bauernstube
of the inn. Oberndorf was a port on the navigable river Salzsach, in those days an important commercial thoroughfare. When it was
Bockbier
time or the
Heurige,
the strong, heady new wine flowed, the sailors foregathered in the tavern at night, zithers twanged, bawdy songs were sung.

As a matter of fact Father Nostler, a sour and crabbed man, had already put in a complaint to the Archbishop’s Consistory in Salzburg about his assistant. In his letter he drew a picture of Mohr going about like a wild student with long tobacco pipe and pouch, evidencing a preference for music and musical entertainment rather than his breviary and consorting with low sailors who sang ditties that could not be considered uplifting. This was not the type of man to look after the spiritual needs of the congregation and he asked to have him transferred. Fortunately an investigation by the Dean of the Cathedral established that for all of his gaiety and love of life and people, Mohr carried out his duties, was particularly conscientious about bringing comfort to the sick and was liked by most of the community. So for the moment no action was taken on Father Nostler’s charges.

“But about this poem, then,” Gruber continued, “or whatever you wish to call it,” and he paused with a look of enquiry.

Mohr, his anger now fled, said almost apologetically, “Well, I only thought that since there is not a note to be had from the organ and you are almost a virtuoso on the guitar, I wondered if you might not be able to arrange something—let’s say in two parts for your voice and mine, perhaps a chorus for the children, with guitar accompaniment. If it were simple they could learn it quickly and we might have it ready for tonight.”

Gruber was again surprised. “Guitar in the church? On Christmas Eve?” he queried, and already envisioned the expressions of shock and disapproval on the faces of the congregation and more fuel to Nostler’s fire. And yet he had thought when he had been confronted with the organ damage, “Needs must when the devil drives.” So he said, “Perhaps one might. Let me see what you have written.”

Gruber took the paper and read the first stanza, and ever more rapidly carried along, those that followed. And as he did so a queer chill ran down his spine. It was indeed not
that
kind of a song. On the contrary. It seemed to lay its hand upon his heart and speak to him gently, simply and movingly and he looked up in utter astonishment at his friend who stood there with the diffident air of one totally unaware that he had produced anything extraordinary.

Gruber was both stirred and puzzled by the words. Whence had they come? From where within this gay, light-hearted, seemingly irresponsible young man who always seemed to have either a joke or a song on his lips and never a serious thought? What was there about them that was so strangely compelling?

“Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht.”

The very first two lines immediately seemed to exercise an hypnotic effect upon him and already he found himself listening to the faint sounds of music waiting to be born. He was both confused and excited.

He stammered, “Y-yes, I understand. The guitar accompaniment kept simple and the children could sing the last line of each stanza in four part chorus. Let me take it home and see what I can do.” For he wished now to be alone with the words that Joseph Mohr had written, to give himself up to the spell that the poem in its innoccnce and simplicity had begun to weave about him. He clapped his hat hurriedly upon his head, wound his woollen muffler about his neck, said, “I’ll be back as quickly as I can,” and set off through the snow for his home in Arnsdorf.

he characters of the two friends, Mohr and Gruber, could not have been more antithetical, and at the time of the incident of the Christmas Eve crisis, the priest appears as the more robust and dramatic figure of the pair. For he was a bastard born of a musketeer, Joseph Mohr, who simultaneously deserted his mistress Anna Schoiberin, a seamstress in Salzburg, and his army, and was never seen or heard from again.

In accordance with the customs of the times, the boy born of this union on 11 December 1792, was allowed his father’s name but his start in life was neither auspicious nor enviable.

To begin with there were problems connected with the baptism. No one could be found willing to stand sponsor for this unfortunate by-blow, the third in the life of a poverty-stricken woman. Eventually one Franz Joseph Wohlmuth offered himself for this rite but was compelled to send a substitute to the font, for he himself was forever barred from crossing the threshhold of the church by his gruesome profession. Franz Joseph Wohlmuth was the official hangman and executioner of Salzburg.

As is often the case with illegitimates, the child was talented, intelligent and attractive. As a boy of eight or nine, he had a stroke of luck—probably the only one of his entire life. His voice and charm brought him to the attention of Johann Hiernle, an important priest in charge of the Cathedral choir. Hiernle took him under his wing, opened his house to him, became his foster-father and undertook his education.

Mohr developed a fine tenor voice. He was taught to play the violin and organ, and thus was rescued from what otherwise would have been an existence of abject squalor and drudgery. But there was also a price to pay. He was unable to command his own destiny, since he owed his good fortune to Father Hiernle who had him marked for the Church. For two years he attended the Seminary at Salzburg, again thanks to his foster-father, for bastards were not ordinarily admitted to this school, and on the 21 August 1815, the boy whose heart all through his student years was filled with the joy of life, gaiety and fun was ordained a priest. He was a most unlikely one. Also he had a further handicap. Never strong, he had weak lungs and lacked the stamina to handle a church on his own.

This was the man whose trifling little verses written to cope with an emergency Franz Gruber now clutched in his fingers as he hurried homewards and like deaf Beethoven, tried to listen to the harmonies already clamouring within him.

Gruber’s beginning had been of undistinguished placidity when contrasted with the origin of his friend. He was born on 25 November 1787, the third son of a weaver of Hochburg, close by the Bavarian-Austrian border. They were poor; their cottage tumbledown. Like Mohr, Gruber was talented musically and this leaning divided his family. His father considered it a waste of time for a boy who was to become a weaver; his mother, more sympathetic, abetted him in secret lessons given by one of those wonderful characters which every Austrian village in those days seemed to have—organist-choirmaster-schoolteacher, Andreas Peter Lichner.

The boy progressed famously but without hope of any future other than the weaver’s chair. The elder Gruber had no use for music.

And then, as they so often do in this story, Fate and Chance took a hand. When Franz Gruber was twelve years old, Peter Lichner fell ill and there was no one to play the organ in the church on Sunday. No one, that is, except Franzl, who sat at the console, his feet barely reaching the pedals and to the astonishment of all, played the High Mass. Bursting with pride at the praise showered upon his son, father Gruber not only withdrew his objections but delved into the family sock and invested five
Gulden
in an old spinet so that the boy could practice.

Further, he was sent to Burghausen for two years to study with Georg Hartdobler.

In 1806, already an accomplished musician, he attended technical school and a year later secured the position of teacher at the village school of tiny Arnsdorf. In this humble post he remained for twenty-one years.

Even Gruber’s first marriage lacked the romance on which epic narrative may be built, for it was more a succession than a saga. He wed the widow of his predecessor, acquiring simultaneously a wife, several offspring, and the late husband’s job as sexton and choirmaster. When she died he married another Arnsdorf girl, and later, once more widowed, married a third time.

It was in 1816 that he secured the additional post of organist in St. Nikola’s Church in the neighbouring town of Oberndorf. And there he made the acquaintance of the ebullient young priest, Joseph Mohr.

Music in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe was an almost universal diversion. It could be indulged in by great and lowly alike. Amateurs gathered together in the villages, towns and cities in string trios, quartets, sextets. If one could not afford to own an instrument one could always sing and devotees blended their voices in four part motets, cantatas, madrigals, carols or folksongs.

When one thinks of the amount of music that was “made” throughout the German and Austro-Hungarian states in those times in the great cities such as Frankfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, Budapest, Vienna, Cologne, Mannheim and Berlin, it is astonishing that only the giants such as Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin survived. Music-makers by the thousand flourished. Yet they were insignificant and their works are either nonexistent or unremembered. How much more hopeless of immortality then was the unassuming organist who sat at the console of the parish crossroads church.

For Mohr and Gruber, music was a mutual language. They probably played four-handed Bach and Handel on the organ, or duets on their
“Zupfgeigen”
or “pluck-violins”, as guitars were known in their times.

Nor was composition a great mystery. Mohr handing Gruber his lyric and expecting a setting back that same Christmas Eve would have surprised neither. For one of the aptitudes of any competent musician was improvisation. He could sit down at the pianoforte, harpsichord or organ without notes and play whatever melodies or harmonies came into his mind. Down through the years Gruber would have whiled away hour after hour alone in the church, simply letting his fingers wander over the keyboard and allowing the music to flow.

At Arnsdorf there is yet another onion-domed church, the
Wallfahrtskirche Maria
, where Gruber performed his various duties as sexton. The
Volksschule
stands in its shadow. Here he both taught and lived. He entered the door and was hardly aware of walking through the empty classroom, garlanded for Christmas, past its painted desks and the green tiled porcelain stove at the far end with its curious ceramic-studded, clay hemisphere at the top. There was not a soul about, for the children were already on holiday.