When you think of the carol “Silent Night”, perhaps what comes to mind is a Austrian Tyrolean village, Christmas Eve, the village coated in a fresh fall of snow, with a Christmas tree in the village square and the sound of singing coming from the village church, its stained glass illuminated by candlelight from within. That’s certainly the image I grew up with. I’d heard the tale that the church organ had failed on Christmas Eve after mice had eaten through the leather of the organ bellows, so the curate penned some words and went home to collect his guitar and returned to church as the organist scribbled down a melody. (Perhaps Jonathan and I should collaborate in a similar way!) The carol was sung that night at Midnight Mass and the rest is history. 

On August 1, I was driving past Salzburg, and going very slowly along one of the autobahns, as it turned out to be one of the main holiday getaway days of the summer. As I sat in the traffic jam, I saw a sign to France Gruber Museum in Hallein. I knew that Gruber had composed the music for Silent Night, so I decided that seeking out this museum and having a Christmas experience might be just the thing for a scorching hot day. 

I found a small museum in what had been his house next to the church. Gruber moved to be organist here quite some years after Stille Nacht was written. A number of manuscripts of the carol and the guitar used in the first performance were on display, as well as detail of the life of this provincial musician, buried in the churchyard. Interesting, but I felt I needed to visit the site of the carol’s first performance itself.

To see Oberndorf though, the village where the carol was first performed, I would have to return across Salzburg to the German border. The village is on the outer bend of a river meander, the River Salzach forming the national border; on the opposite bank is the Bavarian town of Laufen. In the 19^th century it was home to many bargees employed in the transportation of salt, and was prone to flooding.

It was most likely flooding in December 1818 that put the organ in Oberndorf church out of action. In fact Joseph Mohr had penned his lyrics (with six verses) a couple of years earlier in an earlier post in another parish 85 miles away, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, during a time when Europe was suffering poor harvests (affected by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia, not that this cause was understood at the time).

Mohr and Gruber (who was actually based in the nearby village of Arndorf) therefore had some warning that alternative musical arrangements might be needed. The carol spread to the Austrian Tyrol, was taken up by two singing families, Rainer and then Strasser, (forerunners to the Von Trapps of “Sound of Music” fame) and its popularity continued to grow; Gruber’s name had however become detached from the carol and many at the time thought it was composed by Beethoven or Mozart, or a traditional folk tune, though the true provenance has fortunately been reestablished subsequently.

The church, new in only 1793, had been damaged beyond repair by repeated flooding and was demolished in 1906. After proper flood defences were constructed, a small “Stille Nacht” chapel was built on the site of the former church.

I don’t know what organist Gruber would make of being depicted in stained glass playing the guitar when it was Mohr who played the instrument, and I found the small chapel to be rather ‘kitsch-y”, but it was good that the carol is remembered in the place where it was first performed.

In 2011, a new English translation was made, to reflect the six verses written by Joseph Mohr, and to be a truer translation.

There was a time in my younger days when I found Stille Nacht to be a bit ‘wallow-y’ and over-sentimental, and would avoid programming it in carol services if I could, but as time has gone by, I think I’ve come to appreciate it more, when stripped of the ‘cinematic’ overtones of which I spoke in the first paragraph. Return it to 1^st Century Palestine, read all six verses (perhaps removing the reference to “Holy infant with curly hair”!) and it does start to approach the heart of the Nativity story.