OPINION: A Christmas miracle

What’s left is the miracle of the music itself, and even that has changed a bit. The original melody was – try to imagine this – “a sprightly, dance-like tune” instead of the slow, peaceful lullaby we sing today. And because the composer of record was an otherwise unheard-of musician, it was long believed that the “real” composer had to have been someone like Mozart or Haydn. Only in 1995, when an original score was discovered and authenticated, was this idea discredited.

By then, “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” was 177 years old and had been translated into an untold number of languages and sung by millions of people the world over. How did it travel so far from its obscure birthplace back in the days before worldwide media? By means of a master organ builder, who also repaired organs, and who visited the village of Oberndorf several times in the early 1800s (lending credence to the broken-organ theory). He took a copy of the song home with him, and two traveling families of folk singers (like the Von Trapp Family Singers) took it up, included it in their concerts, and changed the melody from sprightly to slow in the process. By the 1840s, the carol was being sung each year by the Royal Cathedral Choir in Berlin, because it was a favorite of King Frederick William IV of Prussia. And thus its true fame began.

Franz Gruber and Father Joseph Mohr both lived and died in modest circumstances. Father Mohr, eulogized as “a reliable friend to mankind, toward the poor, a gentle, helping father,” passed away without a penny to his name, as he had donated all of his earnings to the care of needy seniors and the education of children.

But the song the two created, writing in obscurity and composing in haste, “is sung by untold millions every December, from small chapels in the Andes to great cathedrals in Antwerp and Rome,” says Christmas historian Bill Egan. It was perhaps sung most movingly, hauntingly, and memorably during World War I, on Christmas Eve in 1914, when soldiers on both sides of the front put down their arms and joined in singing this hymn to heavenly peace.

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.