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Updated: July 13, 2025
It is interesting to see the exact type that each theme represents; but it is not so important as to catch the distinction, the virtue of folk-song per se and the purely natural utterance of one's own. Of course, every one writes always in his folk-tones.
My industrious scullion had been deeply moved by a folk-song from the Ukraine, one of those songs rich in poetical feeling and simple metaphor which go straight to the heart; he therefore got up to make the welcoming speech, and, encouraged by the tears of joy which rose in the eyes of our guest, he quite took possession of him.
Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for succumbing to fantasy.
We also find that, at the time when Goethe was writing his best songs, Mozart and Haydn were, with equal enthusiasm, composing music for the folk-song, as if they had "learned it listening to the birds" that is to say, to the birds in the woods, not, like one of the new branch schools of romantic miniature poets, to the birds singing their sickly songs in gilded cages in a parlor.
A tiny window beside the door in the background, shows a glimpse of the forest beyond. Hansel and Gretel are at work, he making brooms, she knitting. Gretel sings an old German folk-song, beginning thus: All the melodies in this act have a strong family resemblance, but this song, a cradle song of the long ago, is the only one not composed by Humperdinck.
A little servant-girl was taking down the shutters of a shop and singing an old German folk-song. Christophe almost choked with emotion. O Fatherland! Beloved!... He was fain to kiss the earth as he heard the humble song that set his heart aching in his breast; he felt how unhappy he had been away from his country, and how much he loved it.... He walked on, holding his breath.
Vedrai Carino is a simple tune, almost as simple as a folk-song and we set great store by it; yet Michael William Balfe wrote twenty-seven operas filled with similarly simple tunes and in a selective draft of composers his number would probably be 9,768. The Ave Maria of Schubert is a simple tune; so is the Meditation from Thais. Why do we say that one is better than the other.
That Schwabian folk-song sounded strangely pathetic under the cold northern stars, and did not do the men good who lounged about the fire after the toil of the day. It put a dull ache into their hearts, and a yearning which was akin to belly-hunger, and sent their souls questing southward across the divides to the sun-lands. "For the love of God, Sigmund, shut up!" expostulated one of the men.
Tradition has it that Bengerd was killed in battle, having gone with her husband on one of his campaigns. "It was not heard in any place," says the folk-song wickedly, "that any one grieved for her." But the King mourned for his beautiful queen to the end of his days. Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the affection of his lonely old age.
National to the core, he embodied in his music the finest qualities of the folk-song, and noble tone-painter that he was he excelled his predecessors in his employment of the orchestra as a means of dramatic characterization.
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