Franz Xaver Gruber

Browse piano sheets by Franz Xaver Gruber on Zen Virtual Piano. It was Christmas Eve 1818 when Joseph Mohr, assistant priest of the new St Nicola parish in Oberndorf, gave a poem to Franz Gruber, then filling in as organist, with a request for a fitting melody for two solo voices, chorus and guitar. Gruber composed the melody that night, and he and Mohr performed it for the first time in St Nicholas church, with Mohr accompanying on guitar. Afterwards he wrote an additional organ arrangement, but he described the melody himself as merely a simple composition. A melody made at short notice that its composer called simple suggests how little he expected the song to outlast that Christmas, and how modestly he regarded his own part. Franz, fifth of the six children of the linen weavers Josef and Maria Gruber, was meant to follow his father's trade, yet from an early age his heart was set on music. Andreas Peterlechner, his schoolteacher, backed his talent with free music lessons that his father vehemently resisted; after years of secretive organ practice, Franz was given an instrument of his own at eleven. A weaver's son who practiced the organ in secret suggests a drive for music strong enough to go against his father's wishes, with a teacher's help making it possible. Several bureaucratic hurdles later, in 1807 he received his first schoolteacher appointment, which also made him the church's caretaker and organist. Though he had a name as an excellent teacher, his true passion was music, a consolation in hard times, since only four of his twelve children reached adulthood and two of his wives died. His love of music, from 1817, linked him with Oberndorf's new assistant priest, Joseph Mohr, an enthusiastic singer and guitarist. A life marked by the deaths of children and wives, with music as comfort, hints at why the shared friendship and the music it produced may have mattered to him over the years. In 1829 he resigned his posts in Arnsdorf and Oberndorf, because his wish to be named teacher in Oberndorf was never fulfilled and he had disagreements with his supervisor in Michaelbeuern Monastery. The parish church in Hallein, at that time the province of Salzburg's second largest city, named him choir director, singer and organist in 1835. His 1854 document set out to correct mistaken ideas about the song: Michael Haydn had not composed it, and it did not come from the Zillertal valley in Tirol but from Oberndorf in SalzburgerLand. He kept returning to the carol with new settings, one for organ and another for organ and orchestra, besides writing many more carols and masses that Austrian churches still sing. A document written to set the record straight about a song he once called simple suggests that he came to care about its true origin, even though he had called the melody simple.

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