Childrens song)
| Children (are such little hands) | |
|---|---|
| Bettina Wegner | |
| publication | 1976 |
| length | 2:03 |
| Genre (s) | song writer |
| text | Bettina Wegner |
| music | Bettina Wegner |
Children , also known under the first line Are so little hands , is a ballad by Bettina Wegner ; it is their most famous song. The American folk singer Joan Baez sang it several times - also in German - and thus contributed to its international distribution.
content
At the beginning, the text shows how children should be treated and brought up and what should not be done. Every note is provided with a reason. After hands, feet, ears, mouths and eyes, the souls are taken into account and finally the backbone. The song ends by saying that there are too many people without a backbone.
construction
The eight stanzas consist of four verses each . If you put two verses together, you get blunt paired rhymes . These are all troches .
The music consists of two parts for two stanzas each. The sequence changes after the fourth stanza so that the last stanza sounds like the first again. The song is in C minor . In addition to the tonic, the first melody uses the subdominant and the dominant . The second melody begins with the parallel major chord , changes to the corresponding dominant and ends on the basic chord. The first melody rises twice from the root to the fifth and falls back to the root. The second melody goes twice from the third down to the root note. In terms of size, this corresponds to a nursery rhyme .
Origin and Distribution
Looking back, Wegner described an incident in a first-class compartment of a GDR long-distance train as the trigger for the song. There she noticed a man who kept pounding his diplomatic suitcase with his thick fingers . The man seemed unbalanced and unhappy to her, and she wondered what had happened to him since he was a baby . She thought of her own child. The lyrics were written on her notepad while she was on the train ; it is a "song of seconds". In the Federal Republic of Germany, the song was by a use in the ZDF program registration D known.
literature
- Martin Ketels (ed.): Liederkarren (= song book 3; kunter-bund-edition 71017). Publisher Student for Europe - Student for Berlin GmbH, Bad Soden, 2nd edition 1980, No. 72. From 4th edition: Bund-Verlag, Cologne 1992 u. ö., ISBN 3-7663-1017-8 .
Web links
- Text of the song at musikguru.de
- Bettina Wegner - Children (Are So Little Hands) (1978) on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bettina Wegner: When my songs are no longer correct (= rororo 4399). Reinbek, Rowohlt 1979, ISBN 3-499-14399-2 .
- ^ Story of a song - Bettina Wegner on "Are so little hands ..." , in: SPIEGEL Online, video from October 1, 2015, accessed on April 8, 2017.
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 11, 2020, p. 13.