The Story of Silent Night (7 page)

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 in 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.

Music and words touch on some secret melancholy chord so that its listeners are never far from tears. “Maudlin!” yapped the Teutonic hatchet men. “Is this indeed so?” asked one later defender. “It is true, the song is soft and sentimental. But is it a sin to have a gentle and compassionate heart? Is it wrong to be possessed of a soul?”

Eventually it began to dawn upon its detractors that they were pursuing a butterfly with a cannon. This bright-winged song was never meant to be a concert piece for percussion and cymbals or to match the symphonic polyphony of the masters of music. It was intended to be sung in a small church and from thence it entered the home where on the most tender night of the year, families gathered with their children. It never tried to loom larger. And yet how big it has become.

t last the baying of the pack pursuing the two innocents resting peacefully in their graves subsided. The nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and with it came honour and recognition for Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber. Plaques and reliefs blossomed on walls, memorials were erected, museums opened, new grave markers were wrought and the simple and sometimes pathetic memorabilia collected to which might cling some of the magic from two men who never professed to have any.

It was difficult in the case of Mohr, because there was so very little of him left. No one had cherished him enough in life to care to remember his lonely death. He had so few possessions to leave and no one to inherit what there was. Not I even his name was his own.

It was not easy to arrange a shrine for him, or assemble the few relics by which he might live again in the eyes of a visitor. But there was the modest cottage in Oberndorf which had once served as the Vicarage to St. Nikola and now adjoins the small memorial chapel raised to the memory of the men.

For a small fee an ancient peasant Granny jingles the keys at her belt, unlocks the door and shows you the room where that ecclesiastical bird of passage lived during his brief tenure there as assistant and chief gadfly to grumpy Father Nostler.

Her grandmother must have known Mohr personally and probably disapproved of his wild ways.

The chamber contains the truckle bed on which he slept, a chest of drawers handpainted in gay colours in Austrian style and a table on which reposes his rosary, his Bible and prayer book, a candlestick, a crooked pipe, a jar and a tobacco pouch. And those are the remains of Mohr.

If he were to return today he would not recognize the bronze bust of himself which, with that of Gruber, occupies a niche in St. Nikola, nor the character of the young priest painted on the iron fretwork over his grave, nor the saintly old man depicted in stained glass within the memorial chapel. For it is not even certain that the skull exhumed from the cemetery at Wagrain was his. Everything he ever was has been obliterated with the exception of some verses of a song.

Gruber was more fortunate. He had a large family and a measure of fame. Upon his passing his wife (who survived him by ten years), and his children saw to it that things that had impinged not only upon his life, but on his work were preserved. These are now a permanent memento in the Silent Night Museum in Hallein. There you will see his pianoforte, his desk and chair, his inkwell, his pen, the kind of notepaper he used for his compositions, the manuscript of the song, the famous Halleiner version of 1854 and original of the very one he copied and sent to the
Kapellmeister
in Berlin. And further to bring him to life there is the guitar he played in the church at Oberndorf to accompany his friend, himself and the children.

On the wall hangs a portrait in oil of the musician whose fingers once plucked the strings of the now mute instrument. He is clad in a bottle-green coat. His green waistcoat has tiny roses embroidered upon it and he wears a blue stock upon a white shirt. His eyes, a peculiarly light brown, gaze out of a nineteenth-century face, long nose, long sideburns, unruly hair framing a high, broad forehead, cleft chin and humorous, sardonic mouth that seems to say, “Well, and now here you are. And you’ve had to pay admission, too. Where were you all a hundred years ago?”

During the last century and a half Oberndorf, Hallein and Wagrain have changed, but Arnsdorf has never stirred. In that little tucked-away corner of the world yesterday and tomorrow are as one. The schoolhouse adjacent to the church, except for the plaque over the door, is exactly the same as it was when Gruber taught there, even to the benches and desks in the classroom, the green porcelain stove and the scribblings on the blackboard.

The plaque reads:

“Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
Wer hat Dich o Lied gemacht?
‘Mohr hat mich so schön erdacht
Gruber zu Gehör gebracht,
Priester und Lehrer vereint.’ ”

For this a free translation might be:

“Silent night, Holy night,
Oh song, who made you?
‘Mohr created my words so beautifully,
Gruber brought the melody to life,
Priest and schoolteacher together.’ ”

Somehow even more touching than the things at Hallein are Gruber’s quarters upstairs over the classroom, exactly as they were when he lived and worked there for so many years. The spinet that was there then is still in place, the same crucifix hangs upon the wall and there is the painted furniture and desk. But amongst the relics are those that bring us closer to him; papers he corrected of pupils long gone and the framed report of the school board upon his application for the job of teacher. Succinct and revealing it reads: “Musical knowledge of extraordinary ability in all branches, particularly as organist.”

Nothing else has altered except that today a school-mistress in a red and blue dirndl is there in the place of Gruber in his flowered vest and bottle-green coat, and if you were to visit you might find her giving a lesson on the zither in the late afternoon in the empty classroom to a girl with two long yellow braids. Gruber too, gave private music lessons in this manner and you might expect almost to see him at the school, or plodding down the road on his way to Oberndorf. For as the village was in times past, so it still looks and feels today, as the peasants there go clothed practically as they did then, the whitewashed homesteads unchanged.

Oberndorf has expanded somewhat more. Many new houses have been built but it, too, seems to live on memories, for the river Salzach is no longer a thoroughfare or an artery of trade, and the sailormen whose rough songs and hearty beer carousels were such an irresistible temptation to a gay young priest, are gone. The new church built in 1902 on a site further away from the river, looks exactly like the old and its interior is identically glittery with saints and martyrs, gold and silver twisted columns, stained glass and religious paintings.

Not far from the vicarage where Mohr dwelt is an old mill and a tall, square water tower dating from the year 1540. The millstream has vanished, but there is a pool which at one time must have been connected with it. In it lie some trout idly fanning their tails, ignoring the alien goldfish drifting by. In a photograph taken before the century’s turn, this water tower is visible adjacent to the original baroque Church of St. Nikola which has now disappeared, pulled down after damage by one of the Salzach floods. On its site the Silent Night Memorial Chapel was built in 1937. The structure is ugly and uninspired, resembling more a small mausoleum than a building that should remind one of something that has brought pleasure to so many millions of people. Hexagonal in shape, bullet-domed with its shingle-roof porch, its interior is no less disappointing. There is a wood carving of the Nativity over a tiny altar and two stained glass windows respectively idealizing Mohr and Gruber.

And yet once a year this edifice undergoes a transfiguration, and if there are such things as restless spirits and the surviving souls of men wandering the invisible planes, it will be to this place that the ghosts of Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber will return on Christmas Eve. For here it is when the snow is on the ground again that the living Christmas trees surrounding the Chapel are festooned with lights and the stars descend to crown them. On the very spot where originally it was heard, Silent Night is sung as it was that very first time.

There could be no more touching performance. For on that one night Franz Gruber’s guitar is removed from its case in Hallein and brought over to Oberndorf where, as they did in 1818, its strings vibrate again and provide the background for the voices of children of the town, many descended from those first twelve, singing to Gruber’s music and the words of Mohr of the birth in Bethlehem. There are singers, too, at Mohr’s grave at Wagrain, others where Gruber lies in Hallein, and yet another group intones the hymn at the schoolhouse of Arnsdorf. Simultaneously the song echoes in millions of homes throughout the world. What better tribute could there be to the two men in whom, for a few hours on a December day, their simple and devout love of God and duty had kindled the flame of genius and from whose collaboration something deathless had been born?