Re: the Hatikvah melody

[Robert Cohen <rlcm17...>]

Hope Ehn's advisement was wonderfully enlightening, and added *much* to my 
understanding/knowledge of the sources of the ubiquitous "wandering melody" 
(as folk music historians call it) that found its way into "Hatikvah"--thank 
you!  Pete Seeger used to do a little demonstration of the travels undergone 
by this melody, but he began w/ "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"--which he 
confidently described (even in Carnegie Hall) as "a melody you'll all know." 
  He pointed out that melody in the Norwegian song "Oleanna," a Swedish 
hambo (couples dance) melody, and many others and mentioned that Mozart had 
written piano variations on it (K. 265, "Ah, vous dirai-je, maman"); then 
switched it into a minor key and came up w/ a Ukranian dance melody and, 
slowed up, "Hatikvah"--which is pretty close to one of the variations in 
Mozart's piece.  I wonder how old "Twinkle, Twinkle"--as *that* song--is? -- 
Robert Cohen


>From: Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
>Reply-To: Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
>To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
>Subject: Re: Hatikvah
>Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 12:42:31 -0500 (EST)
>
>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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