The Story of Silent Night (5 page)

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.

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?