On Christmas Eve, 1818, the curate of Oberndorf in Austria, Josef Mohr, dropped in to see the second organist, Franz Gruber, who was a schoolteacher in the next village. He had written this little carol, he said. Could Franz do him a tune, for choir and guitar accompaniment, writes Timothy Garton Ash
By when? Oh, by this evening, please. The choir should sing it at midnight Mass.
So Gruber sat down and tossed off a quick number. "Si-er-lent Night, Ho-er-ly Night."
Now here's the point: we would not be hearing the tune of Silent Night in hundreds of thousands of churches, chapels and homes across the world this evening; the text would not exist in 300 languages, from Catalan to Tagalog; there would not be, at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth, Michigan, a 56ft replica of the chapel in Oberndorf which commemorates the original Church of St Nicholas; you would not be able to buy an electrified Silent Night-playing model of that chapel as a "corporate gift" for $29.99; none of this would have happened were it not for the mice in the organ of St Nicholas's.
Because there were mice in the organ - the story goes that it was mice, but perhaps it was rats, or just dust - the instrument had to be repaired.
This brought Karl Mauracher, a master organ-builder from the Ziller valley, to the church in Oberndorf. He heard the carol and brought a copy back to the Ziller valley. There he played or sang it to a family of singing sisters, the Strassers, who seem to have been something vaguely like the Julie Andrews gang in The Sound of Music. The Strasser sisters incorporated Silent Night into their repertoire as they travelled around German-speaking central Europe selling gloves and trilling songs.
Another group of singing sisters, the Rainers, supposedly performed the new folk-hit before the emperors of Austria and Russia, as well as taking it to America in 1839. (One has the impression that you could not safely cross the road in central Europe without being waylaid by a band of Austrian singing sisters.)
Thus Silent Night began its journey to becoming the world's most famous carol. To be sure, it's a pretty good tune. The words are not bad either, at least those of the first verse, although I slightly prefer this Taiwanese Ho-Lo-Oe version:
Peng-an mi! Seng-tan mi!
Ching an-cheng! Chin kng-beng!
Kng chio lau-bu chio Eng-hai,
Chin un-sun koh chin kho-ai,
Siong-te su an-bin,
Siong-te su an-bin.
But it's the tune that works the magic. Much of its charm comes from its simplicity. Was this because Franz Gruber only had a few hours to dash it off and then rehearse the choir, as well as cutting the firewood, milking the goat and plucking the Christmas goose?
Or because the organ had broken down, so the music had to be simple for the guitar? Or just because he knew the limited musical abilities of his village choir? Whatever the cause, the simplicity makes the universality.
Yet there are probably hundreds of other equally beautiful tunes out there, and certainly as many amateur Christmas hymns of equal quality. What made this the all-time world hit, probably still even more widely known than the Beatles' Yellow Submarine? Answer: the mice in the organ. In other words: chance, luck, fortune.
Or rather, as is usual in these cases, a whole string of lucky coincidences - assuming, in the generous spirit of this season, that your definition of luck stretches to embrace ending up as a corporate gift at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland.
Napoleon knew this when he famously asked of one of the senior officers commended to his attention: "Is he lucky?" Machiavelli makes the point in The Prince: "I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves."
Yet most of the time we act as if the proportion of our destiny that we can control is very much larger. We feel that if people are successful or rich, they must be especially able; if companies prosper, they must be well managed.
And we constantly succumb to what Henri Bergson calls "the illusions of retrospective determinism". Because something happened, it somehow had to happen. There must have been good reasons for it. It's as if we can't live with the idea that so much is the result of chance. If so, why put in so much effort?
The religion that Silent Night celebrates also has this insight: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
However, Christianity suggests another larger pattern, in which effort in this life is rewarded in the next. A memorial in the chapel at Oberndorf shows Josef Mohr listening from a window in heaven to children singing his carol down on Earth.
But how about living with the plain, knowable truth: that at the end of the day, half of it is luck? Is that really so unbearable? Is it more consoling to think that tragedy strikes for a reason or without reason? On account of an errant gene, a devil, a socio-economic cause, or simply due to chance? If you know that half of anyone's good fortune can be ascribed, precisely, to fortune, does that make it better or worse to contemplate?
So just pop round and ask a friend to dash off a tune in time for the evening performance. Then sit back and wait for the mice in the organ. Either way, you'll always have the song. - (Guardian Service)
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian