It was
Christmas eve 1818, a few hours left and the villagers in the Austrian village at Oberndorf would soon gather
at the ancient square-towered church of St Nicholas to hear the traditional
Christmas music at the Midnight Mass.
Father Joseph Mohr sat at the organ for a
rehearsal. He pressed the organ keys but found them give an unusual chord. He
depressed them again a little harder but they only produced a wheezing grunt.
What could go wrong, he wondered! Not knowing what to do, he despatched a boy
to the nearby town of Fuegen to an old organ builder, expecting he would trace
the trouble and set the organ to play. That hardly kept the young curate at
ease, but thought if the choir couldn’t sing and the villagers didn’t hear the
old music they loved, he would at least surprise them with a new carol. So he rushed
to his desk and found a tattered scrap paper on which he scribbled a few lines
of poetry. He took it to a young local school-teacher, an organist, Franz
Xavier Gruber, and showed it to him, expecting he would set it to a simple tune
to be accompanied by a guitar that the choir could sing that night in time.
Grubber worked hard on it throughout the
afternoon and found a compelling melody to Fr Mohr’s stanzas. That evening, in
frosty moonlit night, Franz Grubber climbed the hill to the church and found
the choir waiting. They began to rehearse the new carol against the background
of occasional asthmatic wheezes from the organ loft, where the expert was at
work on the damaged instrument. He had tracked down the trouble: Starving field
mice had moved into the church and eaten holes in the leather bellows. The
organ music was an impossibility that night.
The simple strains of the new carol filled the church as the
choir rehearsed to the accompaniment of the guitar. It was a hauntingly
beautiful tune; the organ builder from Fuegen himself was listening and wished
to carry a copy back home. The midnight congregation too listened in delight,
forgetting the broken organ disaster in the joy of the new and strangely
mind-lifting music at the midnight service.
The following Christmas, the new carol was being sung throughout
Austria. Within a year or two, millions of Christians all over the world were
singing it in dozens of languages of different nationalities. We continue to
sing it today as well, 200 years since, set to modern advanced technology in
sound, but maintaining its solemnity.
Father Joseph Mohr and the school-teacher Franz Xavier Gruber
are no more but to their memory, a small chapel was built after the little
church of St Nicholas was demolished where from their carol is sung in its
original setting. In Hallein, where Gruber was buried, a Tower of Christmas
Peace was built in his memory. From here too, each Christmas, the carol
resounds its message of peace on earth and good will to men.
As we sing the same carol this Christmas, let us not forget we
owe its beauty to the hungry field-mice at Christmas in 1818 and the efforts
put in by Father Joseph Mohr and Franz Xavier Gruber on Christmas eve to keep
the congregation spellbound with the scintillating melody of: Stille Nacht,
Heilige Nacht!
Silent
Night, Holy Night!
