In March the farmer
In Märzen der Bauer is a folk and children's song from Moravia . It was first published in 1905 under the name Bauernlied .
description
It is a greatly simplified, idealized representation of farming activities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There are several versions, including an older, four-stanza, which was first published by Josef Pommer in 1905 , and a newer one with three stanzas, which is better known today and which is a repositioning of Walther Hensel from his song collection Das Aufrecht Fähnlein from 1923. Both bear the title "Bauernlied". In the older version published by Pommer, the straightening of the field, plowing, harrowing and sowing, as well as planting and grafting the trees are mentioned in the first and second stanzas :
In March the farmer harnesses the steeds.
He tends and plants all trees and land.
He tills, he harrows, he plows and sows,
and moves his hands early and late.
The rake, the spade, he takes in hand
and sets the meadows on level ground;
also he grafts the trees with more noble rice
and saves neither work nor toil nor diligence.
The harvest is brought in by the farmers and their servants in time to find their livelihood in winter. Country life is portrayed as happy and carefree.
Walther Hensel mentions the farmers and the happy servants plowing, harrowing, sowing and digging and raking. In contrast to Pommer, he emphasizes the hay harvest, the grain harvest and the threshing of the grain:
So spring goes by while working,
then the farmer harvests the fragrant hay;
he mows the grain, then he threshes it out:
in winter, there are many happy feasts.
Both versions are usually sung to the same melody. Occasionally the text versions are mixed up. The melody was taken from an older calendar song (see also the section " History ").
history
In March the farmer goes back to the calendar song So hates worries . There it says similarly in the March verse:
In March the farmer
harnesses the oxen, tills
the fields, sows the land,
he plants and furs all the little trees in the land,
that brings us all into a happy state.
This song was widely used and used different melodies depending on the region. It can be found for the first time in 1908 in Silesia together with the melody sung today. This melody shows similarities with the song When d 'Hope would not be from Valentin Rathgeber's Tafel-Confect Volume II (Augsburg 1737). The beginning of the melody corresponds to the first four bars of the first minuet of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Haffner Serenade KV 250 (Salzburg 1776), but in a minor key. The oldest evidence for the text version published by Pommer comes from 1884: The Sternberg men's choir in the Sudetenland wrote this song for a competition and sent it to Pommer.
Walter Hensel's arrangement from 1923 was spread by the musical youth movement and was thus much more popular, even if it never completely supplanted the old version. Hensel justified his new version as follows: “Although sung by the country folk, it is not a folk song; the sometimes screwed, unpopular text first had to be revised ”. Hensel's version is more light-footed, but also idealizing: it reflects urban-bourgeois ideas about rural life at the time. A variant from Thuringia underlines this by allowing the stanzas to flow into a “Fidiralla” on a changed melody. Over time, the song was further updated and repositioned: A variant from the GDR songbook Sing mit, Pionier , published in 1972 , adds a fourth verse to Hensel's otherwise almost unchanged text about the agricultural production cooperatives . In the western federal states it was turned into a protest song against nuclear power and environmental pollution.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Josef Pommer : Songbook for the Germans in Austria 5th edition, Vienna 1905 No. 162, p. 225
- ↑ a b c d Gisela Probst-Effah: "Im Märzen der Bauer" (accessed on November 27, 2016)
- ↑ Georg Nagel: Im Märzen der Bauer in: Lieder Archive, article from March 2, 2016 (accessed November 27, 2016)
- ↑ Eckhard John: So hates the worries (2008). In: Popular and Traditional Songs. Historical-critical song lexicon of the German Folk Song Archive
- ↑ Theo Mang, Sunhilt Mang (ed.): Der Liederquell . Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-7959-0850-8 , pp. 93-94 .
- ↑ ingeb.org: Im Märzen der Bauer , accessed on March 2, 2018
- ↑ Walther Hensel: Das Aufrecht Fähnlein p. 71, quoted from: Gisela Probst-Effah “Im Märzen der Bauer” p. 5 (accessed on November 27, 2016)