O Christmas tree, you bear a green branch

Fir tree in winter

O Tannenbaum, you wear a 'green branch' is a German-language folk song that was first recorded in Westphalia in 1812 with today's melody and has recently been received as a Christmas carol .

The melody of the song is considered to be “one of the most beautiful minor melodies” in the folk song area.

Melody and lyrics

Low German text	Standard German text
'O Dannebom, o Dannebom, you are looking for a green Twig, winter, summer, dat doert de leve Tit.' 1 'Why schold ick 2 not green, because ick 2 can still green, I do not lift Vader and Moder, who can take care of me . And de mi can provide, dat is de leve God, de leet mi were un green, so I am 2 slank 3 and great. '	O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, you carry a green branch, the winter, the summer, that takes time. Why shouldn't I green when I can still green? I don't have a father or mother who can take care of me. And he who can take care of me, that is God, he makes me grow and green, that's why I am strong and tall.

¹in the Westphalian folk songs as "Tit" (text without notes) and "Tid" (text with the notes), so also in the German song library

²in the German song library: "I"

³in the German song library: "strong"

history

Older models, which sing about the fir tree as an evergreen tree in similar text and melody form , have been handed down as dance and social songs since the 16th century. A fragment of the text can be found in the song Es hung a stablehand his bridle , which was printed as a flying leaf between 1550 and 1580 and was included in the Ambras songbook of 1582:

O fir! you are a noble branch,
you green winter and the dear summer time.
When all the trees are dry,
you will go green, noble little pine tree.

The oldest melody is contained in 1590 (without text) in a handwritten lute book by David Sammenhaber . In 1615, Melchior Franck quoted an excerpt from it in his Fasciculus quodlibeticus . Other different text and melody versions have come down to us from the Odenwald ( Neunkirchen ), Silesia , the Kuhländchen and the Chiemgau .

Since the beginning of the 19th century there has been an increased reception of the text in folk song collections. A Silesian text version was published in 1802 in the New Berlin Monthly . Büsching and von der Hagen reprinted part of the text with a different spelling in 1807. Clemens Brentano translated the two-trophic version into High German and included it in the third volume of the Knaben Wunderhorn , published in 1808 .

Silesian	Wunderhorn
The Christmas tree O tonnabaum! o Tonnabaum! You are a noble rice! You green in winter, Os as in summer time. - "Why should I ne gruna, Can I still gruna? I don't know my father or mother, you can take care of me. "-	Fir tree, O fir tree, o fir tree! You are a noble rice! You are green in winter, As in summer time! Why should I not go green, Since I can still go green? I have no father, no mother to take care of me.

Ludwig Uhland made the text the basis of a love poem as part of his drama fragment Schildeis published in 1812 :

O Christmas tree, you noble rice!
Are green in summer and winter.
So is my love,
too , which is green after all.

O Christmas Tree! but you can never
bloom joyfully in colors.
So is my love too,
oh! forever dark green.

The now much better known Christmas carol O Tannenbaum by August Zarnack (1820) and Ernst Anschütz (1824) is based on the same templates .

With its now known melody, the song was recorded for the first time in 1812 by August von Haxthausen in the Paderborn area with lyrics in Low German . Andreas Kretzschmer reprinted it in 1838 in the first volume of the German folk songs . The same melody can be found in Alexander Reifferscheid's Westphalian folk songs (1879). However, only the first stanza of the also Low German text agrees with the version from 1812. The other text, later characterized by Franz Magnus Böhme as "ridiculous", was replaced by two other stanzas. The second stanza is very similar to the Wunderhorn version from 1808 and possibly represents a translation back into Low German. The third stanza with a spiritual echo seems to be printed for the first time in this version. The High German text printed today in most books of utility songs corresponds to this version.

With the increasing spread of the fir tree as a Christmas tree in the 19th century, the song was interpreted as a Christmas carol, to which the spiritual reference in the younger third stanza also contributed.

literature

• Ludwig Erk (Hrsg.): The German folk songs with their ways of singing. Volume 2, Issue 6. Logler, Berlin 1844, p. 50 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ludwig Erk (Hrsg.): Deutscher Liederhort: Selection of the excellent German folk songs from the past and present with their peculiar melodies. Enslin, Berlin 1856, p. 348 f. ( Full text in Google Book Search).
• Ludwig Erk , Franz Magnus Böhme (Hrsg.): Deutscher Liederhort . Volume 1. Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1893 (reprint: Olms, Hildesheim 1963), no. 175, pp. 543-548 ( digitized version ).
• Hartmut Heller: "O Christmas tree". Text contraction over constant melody. In: ders. (Ed.): Repetitions: of waves and reprises in cultural development. Dedicated to Prof. Dr. Alfred K. Treml on his 65th birthday (= Matreier Discussions on Cultural Ethology, 34, 2008). LIT, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-50080-9 , pp. 268–277 ( limited preview in Google book search).
• Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Karl Hermann Prahl: Our folk songs. 4th edition. Engelmann, Leipzig 1900, p. 203 ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dunserevolkstmli00unkngoog~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3Dn218~doppelseiten%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D ).
• Theo Mang, Sunhilt Mang (ed.): The song source . Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-7959-0850-8 , pp. 1058 .
• Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann : The book of Christmas carols. 10th edition. Atlantis, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-254-08213-3 , pp. 321–322.
• Hans Christoph Worbs: The big book from the German folk song. Torch bearer, Hanover 1969, p. 92.

Web links

• O Christmas tree, you have a green branch in the song project of SWR2 and Carus-Verlag
• O Christmas tree you carry a green branch at volksliederarchiv.de
• O Christmas tree at ingeb.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Theo Mang, Sunhilt Mang (ed.): Der Liederquell . Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-7959-0850-8 , pp. 1058 .
2. ↑ ^{a b} Alexander Reifferscheid: Westphalian folk songs in words and ways. Henninger, Heilbronn 1879, p. 48 ( digitized version ). Reprinted slightly changed in: Ludwig Erk, Franz Magnus Böhme (Hrsg.): Deutscher Liederhort. Volume 1. Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1893 (reprint: Olms, Hildesheim 1963), p. 546 ( digitized version ).
3. ^ Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann : The book of Christmas carols. 10th edition. Atlantis, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-254-08213-3 , pp. 321–322.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ludwig Erk, Franz Magnus Böhme (Ed.): Deutscher Liederhort. Volume 1. Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1893 (reprint: Olms, Hildesheim 1963), pp. 543-548 ( digitized version ).
5. ↑ Joseph Bergmann (ed.): The Ambraser song book from 1582. Literarischer Verein, Stuttgart 1845, pp. 137-138 ( digitized in the Google book search).
6. ↑ Three Quodlibets by Melchior Franck : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
7. ↑ Kiem Pauli (Ed.): Collection of Upper Bavarian Folk Songs. Callwey, Munich 1934 (reprint: Parkland, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89340-002-8 ), pp. 357-358. Printed in: Informations from the Volksmusikarchiv Oberbayern 1/2006, p. 16 ( online ( memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. , PDF, 327 kB). 
8. ^ New Berlin Monthly Publication. Published by Biester. Eighth volume: Julius to December 1802. Berlin and Stettin, p. 279 ( digitized in the Google book search).
9. ^ Hoffmann von Fallersleben , Ernst Richter : Silesian folk songs with melodies . Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1842, p. 84 ( digitized in the Google book search).
10. ↑ ^{a b} Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching , Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen : Collection of German folk songs. Braunes, Berlin 1807, p. 98 ( digitized in the Google book search).
11. ↑ ^{a b} Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano (ed.): Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Old German songs. Volume 3. Mohr and Zimmer, Heidelberg 1808, Appendix: Children's songs p. 70 ( digitized version ).
12. ↑ Heinz Rölleke (Ed.): Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Readings and explanations, part 3 (= volume 9.3 of the Frankfurt Brentano edition). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1978, ISBN 3-17-002284-9 , pp. 553-555.
13. ^ Nicolaus Lenau: Works and Letters. Historical-critical complete edition. Volume 4. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-608-95722-7 , p. 616 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
14. ↑ Ludwig Uhland: Schildeis . In: ders .: Collected poems. Cotta, Stuttgart 1815, p. 136 ( digitized in the German text archive ).
15. ↑ Helmut Zimmermann: Where does the Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum” come from? ( Memento of the original of July 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. explicit.net, December 25, 2011, accessed December 14, 2014 
16. ↑ Andreas Kretzschmer: German folk songs with their original ways. First issue. Verein Buchhandlung, Berlin 1838, p. 160 f. ( Digitized version ).