Comprehension  (Page 3/5)

The story almost ended there. Mohr and Gruber had created their carol as a solution to a temporary problem and probably had no thoughts of performing the song again.

The following spring, a repairman patched up the organ. Soon Mohr was transferred to a different parish. For a few years, the carol fell as silent as

the night it had glorified in 1818. But luckily for the world, the organ at St Nicholas remained cantankerous.

In 1824 or 1825, the parish hired a master organ-builder by the name of Carl Mauracher to reconstruct it. During his time in the loft, Mauracher happened to come across the song that Mohr and Gruber had composed. On leaving Oberndorf, Mauracher carried the song with him. People who heard it through him were enchanted with the words and melody. Soon troupes of Tyrolean folk singers, who regularly fanned out over Europe, added Silent Night to their repertoires. Among those who did was the Strasser family.

The Strassers sang Silent Night at a fair in Leipzig, Germany. Audiences loved it. Not long after, a local publisher printed it for the first time, identifying it only as a Tyrolean song. There was no mention of Joseph Mohr or Franz Gruber. The words and tune now spread rapidly. Soon, Silent Night crossed the Atlantic with the Rainers, a family of singers performing and travelling in the United States.

Father Mohr died of pneumonia, penniless, in 1848 at the age of 55. He never learnt that his song had reached some of Earth’s farthest corners. Gruber heard of the song’s success in 1854, when the concert-master for King Frederick William IV of Prussia, began searching for is source. When word reached Gruber, he sent a letter to Berlin telling him of the origins of the song. At first, few scholars believed that two humble men had composed the popular Christmas carol. When Gruber died in 1863, his authorship was still challenged.

The carol is now sung on every continent in the world in scores of languages, from the original German to Welsh, from Swahili to Afrikaans, from Japanese to Russian – all expressing the same deep feeling of peace and joy. It has been recorded by singers from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley.

Over the years, the simple carol has shown a profound power to create heavenly peace. During the Christmas truce of 1914, for example, German soldiers in the trenches along the Western Front began singing Silent Night from the other side of “no man’s land”. British soldiers joined in.

On Christmas Eve during the Korean War, a young American soldier named John Thorsness was on guard duty when he thought he heard the enemy approach. Finger on the trigger, he watched a crowd of Koreans emerge from the darkness. They were smiling. As the young soldier stood in amazement, the group sang Silent Night – in Korean – just for him. Then they melted back into the darkness.

The haunting words and simple melody have lingered in the hearts of people throughout the world since a young priest and his schoolmaster friend first sang the carol over 180 years ago.