If I were a bird
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If I were a bird is a well-known German folk song, the text of which in today's most famous version comes from Johann Gottfried Herder .
The des Lied first appeared in Johann Friedrich Reichardt's Liederspiel Lieb 'und Treue in 1800; it is referred to there as the Swiss folk song. Herder's text was first published in his collection of folk songs (1778/79). An earlier version of the text is contained in a song pamphlet from 1756; a Swiss origin of the song is likely.
The song, which expresses the longing of a person whose thoughts constantly revolve around the absent loved one, was widely received in the 19th century. Many books of useful songs published it in the three-verse version of Herder's text, which was taken over in 1806 in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection . In literary terms, Heinrich Heine already referred to the song in his poem Ich stand auf des Bergspitze (1823) and Joseph von Eichendorff in From the life of a good-for-nothing (1826, chapter 7). In addition, strongly divergent textual and melodic variants circulated, for example in Franz Wilhelm von Ditfurth's collection of Franconian folk songs from 1855. Carl Maria von Weber , Robert Schumann , Clara Schumann , Adolf Jensen and Ferdinand Hiller have set the Herder text .
The song underwent numerous arrangements, musically serious (e.g. by Hermann Josef Nellessen ) as well as humorous-literary (e.g. by Joachim Ringelnatz and Heinz Erhardt ) or even as an installation in public space ( Christian Rösner ). In the 20th century it was often published in books of utility songs, used as a postcard motif and distributed in numerous versions on phonograms. André Previn used the song as a composition in the third movement of his violin concerto from 1999-2001.
Web links
- If I were a bird in the song project of Carus-Verlag and SWR2
- Tobias Widmaier: If I were a bird (2012). In: Popular and Traditional Songs. Historical-critical song lexicon of the German Folk Song Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jutta Assel, Georg Jäger: Folk song motifs on postcards , Goethezeitportal.de, January 2014