Who has the most beautiful sheep?

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Who has the most beautiful sheep is a lullaby by the German poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben . He wrote it in 1830. It was first printed in Amadeus Wendt's Musenalmanach in 1832.

Content, material and motif history

The poem depicts the moon as a shepherd , whose flock is made up of the stars . The text ends in teaching the children to use the peaceful coexistence of the stars as an example.

With the poem, Hoffmann von Fallersleben takes up a motif from the baroque poetry . The image of the moon as a sky shepherd and star shepherd goes back to the hymn poet and Jesuit Friedrich Spee , who introduced it to literature at the beginning of the 17th century. The motif was taken up several times in the Romantic era . Clemens Brentano , who took up one of Spee's poems with this motif in Des Knaben Wunderhorn , had taken up the motif several times, most clearly in his fairy tale about the myrtle maiden .

The song

Print in: Lionel von Donop (Ed.): Hoffmann von Fallersleben. Nursery rhymes. 2nd Edition. Grote, Berlin 1878

Who has the most beautiful sheep?
The golden moon has it, Who lives
behind our trees in the
sky over there.

He comes late in the evening
when
everyone wants to sleep, coming out of his house
to heaven quietly and quietly.

Then he grazes the sheep
in his blue corridor;
Because all the white stars
are only his little sheep.

They don't hurt each
other , one likes the other,
and sisters and brothers are
up there star to star.

And should I bring you one, you
must never scream like that,
you have to be friendly like the sheep
and like their shepherds.

In Fifty Children's Songs (1843) there is a different fifth stanza:

When I look up at the sky,
it always occurs to me:
Oh, let's be as friendly
as these little sheep!

Settings

In the 19th century the song was sung to different melodies. Carl von Winterfeld , a sponsor of Hoffmann von Fallersleben, wrote his first setting in 1831, which Hoffmann published in his collection of Fifty Children's Songs in 1843 . The song was also sung to the melody of the folk song Der Tod von Basel (“When I was a young journeyman”). Settings as an art song created a. a. Wilhelm Baumgartner (op.13.2; 1848), Otto Dresel (1849), Carl Reinecke (op.37.7; 1853), Friedrich Reichel (op.6.2; 1874), Carl Götze (op.182.5 ; 1886), Adolf Sandberger (op. 22,5), Othmar Schoeck (WoO 15; 1904–05) and Leo Blech (op. 28,2; 1925).

Today the song is usually sung to a melody that Johann Friedrich Reichardt had already composed in 1790 for the song In stillem, heiterm Glanze (text by Caroline Rudolphi ).

\ relative f '{\ key f \ major \ time 4/4 \ partial 4 f | c 'c bes bes | a2 g4 c | cf, bes a | g2 r4 g | bes bes aa | d2 c4 bes | aagg | f2 r4 \ bar "|." } \ addlyrics {Who has the most beautiful sheep? That is what the golden moon has that lives beneath our trees in the sky. }

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hoffmann von Fallersleben: Our folk songs. 2nd Edition. Engelmann, Leipzig 1859, p. 145 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ a b Musenalmanach for the year 1832 (Ed. Amadeus Wendt). Leipzig, p. 202 f. ( Digitized version ).
  3. ^ Friedrich Spee: Trutznachtingall. Halle adS 1936, pp. 178-183 ( online at Zeno.org .); Pp. 227-234 ( online at Zeno.org .).
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Nowak: Attempt of a motivic analysis of the shepherd's habit with Friedrich von Spee. Dissertation, Berlin 1954, OCLC 632433673 . Quoted from: Gerhard Schaub: The Spee reception of Clemens Brentano. In: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 13 (1972), pp. 151-180.
  5. ↑ Dieter Martin: Barock um 1800. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-465-03039-7 , pp. 483-496.
  6. ↑ Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano (ed.): Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Volume 1. Mohr and Zimmer, Heidelberg 1806, pp. 283–289 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  7. ↑ Gerhard Schaub: The Spee reception of Clemens Brentano. In: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 13 (1972), pp. 151–180, here p. 175 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  8. ↑ Clemens Brentano: The fairy tale of the myrtle maiden in the Gutenberg-DE project
  9. ^ A b August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Ernst Heinrich Leopold Richter : Fifty children's songs. Mayer et al. Wigand, Leipzig 1843, p. 27 ( digitized version ).
  10. ↑ Theo Mang, Sunhilt Mang (ed.): Der Liederquell . Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 2007, ISBN 978-3-7959-0850-8 , pp. 702 f .
  11. ^ Franz Magnus Böhme : Popular songs of the Germans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Breitkopf and Härtel, Leipzig 1895, p. 473 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  12. ↑ Carl Reinecke: 8 Children's Songs, Op. 37 : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
  13. ^ Carl Reinecke: Fountain of Youth. Collection of the most beautiful children's songs with piano accompaniment. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1876, p. 4 f. ( Digitized in the Google book search).
  14. ↑ Who has the most beautiful sheep? at The LiederNet Archive, accessed March 7, 2019
  15. ^ Karoline Christiane Louise Rudolphi: Poems. Second collection. Braunschweig 1787, pp. 72–74 ( digitized in the Google book search).
  16. ↑ Victorie Gervinus: Natural training in singing and piano playing. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1892, p. 132 u. 177 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive )