Shepherd's Sunday song

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Schäfer's Sunday song , first edition
Illustration of the scene (postcard, late 19th century)

Schäfer's Sunday Song is the title of a three-verse poem by Ludwig Uhland with the opening and closing lines That is the Lord's Day . The poem first appeared in 1815 by Cotta in the volume Gedichte von Ludwig Uhland .

content

The text is a shepherd's self-talk on a Sunday morning that he spends alone with the herd. The Christian meaning of the day is indicated by the ringing of a church bell. Then it is the silence of nature and the vastness of the sky that trigger feelings and gestures of worship in an invisible community in the lonely.

shape

The apparently undemanding work shows a quite unusual and artistic stanza structure. The four iambic lines of each stanza all end in male rhyming words with the rhyme scheme [abba]. The first and last lines are six-syllable ( three- syllable ), the inner lines eight-syllable (four-syllable).

Settings

Uhland's verses became very popular in the 19th century. They were u. a. Set to music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (op. 77,1), Alexis Hollaender , Paul Weingartner and Ernesto Drangosch .

By far the most widespread composition, however, is the non- strophic arrangement for four-part male choir by Conradin Kreutzer . It was part of the repertoire of men's choirs well into the 20th century and is still present in numerous arrangements in popular music conveyed by the media . It derives its effect primarily from the identical hymnic beginning and end to the line “This is the Lord's day!”, Ascending to the emphatic subdominant on “Lord”, in the text repetition via the sixth fourth chord to “Day” and the dominant seventh chord to the tonic returning.

A winged word

The phrase “alone in the far hall ” became a phrase with an ironic undertone.

Buddenbrooks

In Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks (Part Eight, Chapter Five), the boy Hanno is said to recite to his father, the Senator, “Shepherd's Sunday song ... Von Uhland”, but fails miserably. Even the opening line - in the ear of the reader in Kreutzer's radiant setting - he only brings out “very quietly”. After a reprimanding interruption by the father, it says:

“I'm alone in the far hall,” he said, and then it was finally over. The mood of the verse ran away with him. An overwhelming pity for himself made the voice fail him completely and the tears welling up irresistibly from under his lids. "

Web links

Commons : Schäfers Sonntagslied  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Schäfers Sunday Song  - Sources and full texts