The Story of Silent Night Read Online Free PDF

papers when he unpacked. He meant to show it to the choirmaster; he meant to play it for his wife and children; he meant even sometime to make an organ transcription along the lines of his improvisation. But as so often happens, life and the immediate took over. The song was not heard from again for three years.
    In the year 1822, Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria and Czar Alexander I of Russia, during one of those political intimacies which in the Europe of the nineteenth century were to spell life or death for so many marching infantrymen, came to Fügen as guests at the castle of Count Ludwig von Donhoff. And one evening the Count had some of the locals up to entertain his Royal visitors. Amongst these were the family Rainer, the precursors of today’s famous Austrian Trapp Family singers. In their repertoire was Silent Night. Their Majesties were delighted, so much so that the Czar invited the singers to St. Petersburg.
    And here, strangely, the flame dies out again for ten more years.
    It is said that the Rainers continued to spread the song and even took it with great success to America. Yet they do not appear again in its strange career. Perhaps their function was solely to receive it at some time or other from the hands of Karl Mauracher, maybe at one of those moments of violent spring cleaning, where Frau Mauracher tackling the mess of manuscripts in a cupboard threatened to throw the lot out unless her husband did something about them. Thus the song would have come to his attention again and he could have passed it to this group.
    Yet the ears and the hearts of people might still have been unprepared. It is quite possible that had the song been published then, it might never have accomplished that for which it was destined.
    Silent Night was next heard from through another family, the Geschwister Strasser, a quartet consisting of two brothers and two sisters from Laimach in the Zillertal. Laimach and Fügen are neighbours and again we are back in the Tyrol.
    In addition to their yodelling and peasant Schuhplattler dance, which included a great deal of stamping and rump slapping, the Tyroleans were famous throughout Teutonic Europe as the fountain head of Austrian folk-song. They were both a fashion and a fad and when they appeared in their native costume and sang their sentimental mountain songs, they were received enthusiastically. Everyone in the Tyrol seemed to sing. And here again one faces the mystery of design. Would the song have caught on ever by itself if rediscovered as the creation of two unknown men? Or was it the fact that it made its bow to Europe as a Tyrolean Folksong, “Authors Unknown” that gave it its initial impetus, the appeal of something primeval?
    It would remain “Authors Unknown” where Silent Night was concerned for some forty years or more following its creation. Yet the names of the Strasser Quartet have come down to us. The two girls were Amalie and Karoline, the boys Andreas and Pepi. They were not professional singers like the Rainers, but glove makers. Some of the finest chamois and kidskin gloves were exported from the Tyrol to the great annual Leipzig Summer Fair. When the Strassers brought their winter’s work there, the Gesckwister would earn a little extra money by giving modest concerts of Tyrolean folksongs. And by then Silent Night was in their repertoire too. It had become a native creation, belonging neither to Mauracher (if he remembered) nor the Rainers, but to the country. Authors would only have been an embarrassment to authenticity.
    They sang it for the first time in Leipzig at a small affair in 1831 as one of a group of four indigenous carols. A new character in the design made a brief appearance, Franz Ascher, organist of the Royal Saxon Court Orchestra. He was in the audience, found the song enchanting and invited the quartet to return the following year in December and sing it at the Christmas Mass which would be held in the Royal Chapel at Pleisenburg