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

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