The Story of Silent Night by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online

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