Re: Hatikvah

[Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn...>]

The tune is *much* older than "The Moldau" from Smetana's "Ma Vlast," and
seems to have come from further west. This is what, as a musicologist, I
have been able to discover about the origin of the "Hatikvah" tune: 

"Hatikvah"/"La Montovana" FAQ (first written and posted in June, 1997)

The first known appearance of the "HaTikvah" tune was in an intermedio of
1608, performed during celebrations of a Gonzaga wedding in Mantua.
Several composers collaborated on the music for this performance: they
were Claudio Monteverdi, his brother Giulio Cesare Monteverdi, Giovanni
Gastoldi, and Salamone Rossi. Which composer used the tune is not known,
although the fact that there are other tunes also called by some version
of the name "Mantovana," and that some of them are known to be by
Gastoldi, is suggestive. (The lutenist James Tyler attributes it to
Gastoldi on stylistic grounds, and that seems plausible to me.) There is
no evidence that this music was a setting of a pre-existent tune rather
than a new composition -- we simply don't know. 

The tune became very popular: it was used for Italian madrigals (Cataneo),
solo songs ("Giuseppino"), guitar settings (Pico), instrumental settings
in Renaissance style (Zanetti, Giamberti, anonymous), violin divisions
[i.e., variations] (anonymous), trio sonatas (Marini), and was published
in England in Playford's collections of country dances. It is not known
where Smetana (1824-1884) got the tune, but he seems to have believed that
it was a Czech folk tune. 

It is also not known for sure where Naftali Herz Imber (1856-1909) got the
tune, to which he wrote only the words (being a poet, not a composer).
Edith Gerson-Kiwi, in "Grove" (Vol. 9, p. 359), refers to the tune as a
"Romanian folksong." It is quite possible that Imber simply took the tune
from the "Moldau" movement of Smetana's "Ma Vlast" (composed in 1874), and
no evidence whatsoever that he did not do so. 

Hope Ehn                                 <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
(M.M., music history, New England Conservatory; 
 ABD musicology, Brandeis University)



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