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Recording Family Legends for Generations to Come
The following account is a newspaper article written in the Connecticut Sunday Herald – December 24, 1972 written by Walter Mohr
Silent
Night
Rev. Joseph Mohr
THE LOCAL STORY OF "SILENT NIGHT"
The time honored and ethereally beautiful strains of the most popular of all Christmas songs, “Silent Night, Holy Night” forms a bond between the obscure Austrian village of Oberndorf and New Canaan, Connecticut.
It was in Oberndorf, along the Salzach River near the Rococo music capital of Salzburg that the simple Christmas tune was composed and first performed 154 years ago today. Since then the authors of the hymn, who were not notable for any other compositions, have achieved the fame they neither desired nor would have dreamt of.
And this modesty on the part of Franz Gruber and the Rev. Joseph Mohr
have complicated the task of New Canaan’s Walter Mohr as he researches
his family’s history. “Most of my leads are family rumors and legend,”
said 82-year-old Mohr who lives at 143 Heritage Hill Road. “I do know that
my grandfather, a close relative of the author of the song, came to this country
in 1835 from Austria.”
Mohr won’t venture any suppositions about his family history until he has checked it thoroughly. Hence for the time being he does not speculate on the exact relationship between his grandfather and Father Mohr. Unwritten legends through the years have a tendency to stick doggedly to some facts but let others fade. The Mohr family has been proud of its connection with the popular hymn but never obsessed enough with details to record genealogical data.
Digging up these facts is Walter Mohr’s self-imposed duty. “In lieu of family Bible records, I’m writing my reminiscences and family history for my son,” he explained. “It’s a pretty complicated task,” Mohr admitted. “Records are non-existent or hard to find and those that I do get are often in German.” Mohr was raised speaking German but has lost touch with the language.
The circumstances surrounding his ancestor’s composition are no secret, although many spurious legends attend the tale. Such legends include Father Mohr withdrawing from a children’s Christmas celebration in a moment of inspiration and returning several moments later with the words to “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Another tells of Father Mohr being so impressed by a crude dramatization of the Christmas story that he communed with the night on a mountain and went home to compose the hymn.
The most factual account was no doubt provided by Gruber (who wrote the music to Mohr’s poem in 1854, thirty-eight years after the initial performance. Father Mohr had been sent to the church at Oberndorf as a utility priest until a permanent pastor could be found for the parish. Franz Gruber was the organist at the church and a schoolmaster in nearby Arnsdorf.
As the two were about to begin rehearsing for the Christmas Eve service, they noticed that the organ’s bellows had been chewed through by a church mouse. Of course there was no time to have it repaired in time for the Christmas service, but as a way out of the crisis, Father Mohr suggested that if a little poem he had been working on could be set to some music, then he and Gruber with the children’s choir and a pair of guitars could make a nice Christmas ensemble.
Back in 1818, guitars were still exclusive to areas close to and including southern Europe. In the Tyrolean area where the two clerics worked on their Christmas anthem that day, guitar music was heard in concert halls through the compositions of Vivaldi, Boccherini, Scarlatti, and other late Baroque and early Classic period composers of the southern European school.
And it is the Mohr-oriented history that descendent Walter is trying to document now. He has traced the first American Mohr back to his business in the crockery line in New York through contemporary newspaper ads and business records.
As an Austrian and as a close relative of Father Joseph Mohr, Walter Mohr’s grandfather was of course Catholic. But his son married a Lutheran, and the offspring of that union, Walter of New Canaan, has lived his life a Presbyterian.
“But my grandson has just married a Catholic girl,” smiled Mohr, “so I guess religion has come full circle in the Mohr family.”
The New Canaan resident is as modest as his famed forebear when questioned about his own background. Born on Avenue A in Manhattan when that area of the lower east side was heavily German, Mohr moved uptown to Washington Heights as a young man. “I stayed in New York for quite a while, “ he recalled. “Among other jobs, I was market manager for Rupert Breweries.”
The birthplace of the Rev. Joseph Mohr
But in his major calling he followed the lead of his ancestor’s partner, Gruber, and entered the educational field. For years he was the proctor at Columbia University and also served as assistant secretary of the institution. Now in retirement in New Canaan, (he moved here from New Hampshire in 1969,) the always active Mohr is devoting himself to writing his family history starting with the life and times of the modest and gifted curate of the early 1800’s in Austria.
And in a small way, when “Silent Night, Holy Night” is sung anywhere on the globe, besides magnifying the reverence and beauty of the Savior’s birth, a tribute is also sung to Walter Mohr’s ancestor.
Gruber had only an afternoon to work on the music for Mohr’s beautiful poem and only an evening to rehearse the children’s choir. It was one of the happy coincidences of nature and history that let Gruber to compose such simple and engaging music for such a simple and classic religious poem.
The rest, as they say, is history.
