The man who composed the melody of Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht in an afternoon. Franz Xaver Gruber was a schoolteacher and church organist in Oberndorf bei Salzburg when the local priest Joseph Mohr knocked on his door on 24 December 1818 with a poem and a broken organ. Gruber set it to a guitar melody in 6/8 time. They performed it that night at midnight Mass and the song left Oberndorf without them.
Gruber moved to Hallein in the 1830s, served there as choir director and organist for the rest of his life, and died in 1863. He is buried at the Stadtpfarrkirche in Hallein.
The Story
Gruber was not a great composer and probably knew it. He was a working musician in the rural Salzburg region: schoolteacher by day, organist and sacristan by obligation, choir director when the post required it. He passed his teaching exams in Salzburg in 1807, took a bundled position in Arnsdorf that came with housing, a classroom, and the church keys, and spent the next two decades juggling children's arithmetic and Sunday liturgy.
His connection to Oberndorf bei Salzburg came through a second role: he also served as organist and choirmaster at the church of St. Nikolaus there, travelling the few kilometres from Arnsdorf by night. That is where he met Joseph Mohr, the young assistant priest who had written a six-stanza poem called Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht two years earlier in Mariapfarr.
On the afternoon of 24 December 1818, Mohr brought the poem to Gruber and asked for a simple setting for guitar, because the church organ had broken down. Gruber wrote the melody the same afternoon in 6/8 time, a gentle compound meter that suited both the text and the instrument. He signed the autograph copy "Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber." They sang it together at the midnight Mass, Mohr on guitar and tenor, Gruber on bass, with the choir echoing the final lines of each verse.
The carol spread without them. Travelling folk singers picked it up. The Strasser family performed it for the King of Prussia in 1834. The Rainer family brought it to New York in 1839. By the time the song had circled the world, authorship was disputed and both men had been largely written out of the story. Gruber spent years writing to authorities to establish the record. His 1854 document, the "Authentic Cause," is the primary first-person account of what happened that night.
He moved to Hallein in the 1830s, took the choir director and organist position at the Stadtpfarrkirche, and lived there until his death in 1863. The church where he is buried is the same one he served. The melody he wrote in a few hours is now one of the most recorded pieces of music in history.
