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Recently I wrote about peace on earth which was in part inspired by hearing the words “sleep in heavenly peace.” It occurred to me that people might be interested in knowing the story behind the creation of the carol “Silent Night.”
Franz Gruber was a dark-haired Austrian with a dimpled chin who on Christmas Eve day, 1818, was asked to write an accompaniment to a Christmas poem that had been written two years before by the assistant pastor of the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, near Salzburg. In his own words, Gruber told the tale of the creation of the world’s most popular Christmas carol:
On December 24th in the year 1818 the curate of the newly erected parish-church St. Nicola of Oberndorf, Mr. Joseph Mohr handed over a poem to the deputy organist, Franz Gruber (at that time also teacher at Arnsdorf) with the request to compose a suitable melody for two solo voices with choir and the accompaniment of one guitar.
Gruber’s description came thirty-six years later when the Royal Prussian Court Orchestra in Berlin decided to track down who had actually written this carol that had become one of the most popular in Europe. At the time most people believed the carol must have been written by Michael Haydn, a well-known composer of the time. Then, as now, people felt great music had to be written by great men. That a man who at the time had taken a position as a temporary organist to help make ends meet could write such music still astounds music historians.
Curiously, the guitar accompaniment helped to establish Gruber’s authorship, for the organ at Oberndorf had broken down but there was still a need for music for the chorus to sing for the Christmas Eve service. Gruber was not only an organist but an accomplished guitar player (one wild story has him purposely destroying the organ so he would have to play the song on guitar.) The guitar is also important because if you have ever heard “Silent Night” sung with its proper accompaniment, rather that the bombastic huge orchestral versions you hear most of the time, you hear the true brilliance of the song.
In Gruber’s music and his friend Joseph Mohr’s words lies a sermon in itself of how two simple men born in a small Tyrolean village somehow produced the extraordinary. The creation of “Silent Night” testifies to those unpredictable, rare moments when the human and spiritual come together to strike a bolt of transcendental lightning so bright it almost blinds us and rumbles through the air with that crack of inspiration that jerks us our minds awake.
Perhaps we resonate so deeply with Gruber and Mohr’s story and “Silent Night,” because even small children can grasp the obvious parallel with the Christmas story. In this paradoxical time where ecumenicals and fundamentalists clash in all the world’s religions, the Christmas story has become twisted, pedantic, and unfortunately political.
In another time and another place two simple Austrians sought to recover the meaning of that “silent night, holy night.” What they created went far beyond theology and religious exclusivity to stress the pure heart of the story, of a poor shepherd and his wife who were so insignificant that the innkeeper stuck them in a stable. If you read the words Mohr wrote (a translation site offers several possible English versions besides the one most of us know), their power lies in their simplicity (which in part is why translating the original is extremely difficult).
Their power also comes from the refrain in the first stanza, “Sleep in Heavenly Peace,” the few words that do translate easily. For “Silent Night” is above all a song about peace which is why it has inspired so many wartime reminiscences from soldiers and their families. Some of these are collected at the “Silent Night” web site. A soldier remembers a 1968 Christmas in Danang:
Then someone began to sing “Silent Night,” and soon everybody was singing from everywhere in the compound – from foxhole, from bunkers, from guard towers “Silent Night, Holy Night” resounded from the small country, in that small corner of the world, and I’m sure it was joined at some faraway rendezvous with millions of other voices singing “sleep in heavenly peace.”
In an America that seems to have lost its moral compass, where our president can say he sleeps fine while a war rages–as if he were both appropriating and perverting the words of the carol–never have the words of our most popular Christmas song held more meaning, offered more hope and direction.
A major reason America’s moral compass was lost is that we lost faith in those William Jennings Bryan termed “the common people”–people like Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohrs. We also have lost touch with the true meaning of their words and music. The values the song invokes, that the Christmas Story itself invokes, that the teachings of all great religions invoke, lie not in conflict and dogmatism but in the infinite possibilities of the human character and imagination and in harnessing them for equity, for the common good, for all people whether they be poor, or infirm or even so insignificant that we make them sleep in a stable.
Much propaganda flows at this time of year about America as a Godly and Christian nation, so much so that some cannot even accept the idea of a Muslim taking the Congressional oath of office. But anyone who cares to wade into these muddied–even polluted–waters of what America truly stands for, finds not dogma but belief in a simple ideal that asserts all human beings, even those born in the equivalent of stables or small isolated villages have the ability to become extraordinary. Franz Gruber and Joseph Mohr teach us every time we sing or hear their carol that we must do all we can to assure those lives have every chance to fulfill that destiny.
May the lives of all who read this enjoy their particular fulfillment and may you also remember in these contentious times that “love’s pure light” falls on all. When we block that light for whatever reason the night-like shadow we cast is neither silent nor holy.
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