Rejoice in life (song)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Rejoice in life is one of the most popular German-language folk songs . The text was written by the Swiss poet Johann Martin Usteri (1763–1827) in 1793, the melody by the Swiss composer Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) in the same year . Since the Biedermeier period , the song has spread throughout the German-speaking area. In 1912 it was prescribed in Prussia as a "compulsory song" for the 4th year of school.
Form and content
The original text is designed as a round song , the chorus of which everyone sings together (“chorus”) and the stanzas of which singers from the group. The refrain "Rejoice in life, because the lamp is still glowing, pick the rose before it fades" is an executed paraphrase of Carpe diem : Because life is ephemeral like the burning of a candle and the blooming of a rose, the moment should be happy be taken and savored. It is an early mood song , and the group's cheerful mood and the friendship that binds them are also the theme of the stanzas. There are also moral and religious motives.
The dactylic meter in the chorus and iambic meter in the stanzas is loose and irregular, the lines of unequal length rhyme only partially.
Text (1831)
Chant.
1793.
Rejoice in life
Because the lamp is still glowing
Pick the rose
Before it fades!
Many a man takes care and toil,
looks for thorns, and finds them,
and leaves the violet unnoticed that
blooms on his way.
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
When creation shrouds itself shyly,
And loud thunder whether we roar,
So in the evening, after the storm,
the sun shines, oh! so beautiful!
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
Who carefully flees from envy and resentment,
pulls frugality in the garden,
It soon shoots up to the sapling,
Which brings golden fruit.
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
Whoever practices honesty and loyalty,
and likes to give to poor brother
, then contentment
so likes to settle with him.
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
And when the path narrows terribly,
And misfortune plagues us and presses us,
The lovely friendship always extends
the hand of the upright.
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
She dries his tears,
And strews flowers to his grave;
It turns night into twilight,
and twilight into light.
Choir.
Enjoy life, etc
It is the most beautiful bond in life,
Strikes, brothers, hand in hand,
so one flows happily, so one flows easily
into the better fatherland.
Choir.
Rejoice in life,
Because the lamp is still glowing
Pick the rose
Before it fades!
melody
Nägeli's melody in lively three-bar, the main notes of which are predominantly on the four notes of the tonic chord , is tailored to the text. In the popular version it is simplified in a few details. "The accentuation of the actually unstressed syllable" bens "in life, which contradicts the rules, has a ravishing exuberance; it is as if the singer were throwing his hat up for joy. "
Gioachino Rossini edited the melody twice, a. a. in the overture to the opera Semiramide . There are also arrangements by Antonín Dvořák and Ignaz Moscheles .
Paul Graener uses the melody as the theme of the rondo finale of his Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (op.116).
The melody was also part of the Great Awakening , a military ceremony of Prussian tradition.
Literary quote
In Thomas Mann's novel Confessions of the Impostor Felix Krull , Rejoice in Life appears as a secondary motif. At the end of the first chapter of the first book, after characterizing his celebrated but unsound business father, Felix Krull writes:
- "Above the vestibule was a small, ingenious device which, while the door, held open by air pressure, slowly sank back into the lock, played the beginning of the song 'Rejoice in life' with a fine sound."
And in the big conversation in the dining car between Krull - now as Marquis de Venosta - with the paleozoologist Professor Kuckuck in the fifth chapter of the third book, the latter said:
- “» And yet the emergence and continuance of life are tied to specific, briefly circumscribed conditions that were not always required, nor will always be required. A star's habitability time is limited. Earthly life has not always existed and will not always exist. Life is an episode, and on the scale of the eons, a very fleeting one. ""
What Krull-Venosta responds to:
- "That takes me for the same thing," I said. […] “There is,” I added, “a little song: 'Rejoice in life, because the lamp is still glowing.' I heard it ring early and always liked it, but because of your words about the 'fleeting episode ‹It now admittedly assumes a broader meaning.« "
Folding horn verses
The song is also handed down in a coarse version. While the stanza part is filled with a multitude of flip horn verses, the refrain deviates as follows:
"Enjoy life, grandmother is shaved with a scythe, all in vain, it was not smeared."
This version is partly better known than the actual tradition due to the fact that this song is sung by Eder and his regulars in the TV and radio play series Meister Eder und seine Pumuckl in the episode "Pumuckl and the Music".
Secondary literature
Waltraud Linder-Beroud. In: Lutz Röhrich and Erika Lindig: Folk poetry between orality and written form . Tübingen 1989 (ScriptOralia 9), pp. 273–288, and the same, From Orality to Writing? Frankfurt / Main 1989, pp. 233-248.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Max Friedlaender : German song treasure. The most beautiful songs from the old Ludwig Erks collection. Revised, augmented by a hundred songs and with detailed notes . Leipzig undated (around 1920), p. 309
- ↑ Zentralblatt for the entire teaching administration in Prussia 1912, p. 625
- ↑ "Because" still has the old meaning "while" ( Wiktionary ).
- ^ Johann Martin Usteri: Poems in verse and prose: together with a biography of the author , Volume 1, Berlin 1831, pp. 3–5
- ↑ Nägeli's original
