![Ach! due lieber Augustin repetition](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Ach%21_due_lieber_Augustin_repetition.png)
"" ("Oh, you dear Augustin") is a popular
Viennese song, first published about 1800. It is said to refer to the balladeer
Marx Augustin
Marx Augustin (also Markus Augustin, "Der Liebe Augustin") (1643 in Vienna – 11 March 1685 (or 10 October 1705), in Vienna) was an Austrian minstrel, bagpiper, and improvisatory poet most famous for the song, "O du lieber Augustin
"" (" ...
and his brush with death in 1679. Augustin himself is sometimes named as the author, but the origin is unclear.
Background
In 1679, Vienna was struck by the
Great Plague
The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causi ...
and Augustin was a
ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French ''chanson balladée'' or ''ballade'', which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and ...
singer and
bagpiper, who toured the city's inns entertaining people. The Viennese people loved Augustin because of his charming humour in bitter times, and they called him (Dear Augustin).
According to legend, once he was drunk and on his way home he fell in the gutter and went to sleep. He was mistaken for a dead man by the gravediggers patrolling the city for dead bodies. They picked him up and threw him, along with his bagpipes which they presumed were infected, into a pit filled with bodies of plague victims outside the city walls. Next day when Augustin woke up, he was unable to get out of the deep mass grave. He was shocked and after a while he started to play his bagpipes, because he wanted to die the same way he lived. Finally people heard him and he was rescued from this dreadful place. Luckily he remained healthy despite having slept with the infected dead bodies and Augustin became a symbol of hope for Viennese people.
The story, already rendered by the preacher
Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644–1709), lives on in the song, which is still popular in Austria. The tune is nearly identical to that of "
Did You Ever See a Lassie?", although "" is longer and more melancholic than that song.
Text
Use in other musical works
During the classical era the song was a popular theme for
variations
Variation or Variations may refer to:
Science and mathematics
* Variation (astronomy), any perturbation of the mean motion or orbit of a planet or satellite, particularly of the moon
* Genetic variation, the difference in DNA among individuals ...
. E.g. the composer
Paul Wranitzky
Paul Wranitzky (Czech: Pavel Vranický, 30 December 1756 – 29 September 1808) was a Moravian-Austrian classical composer. His half brother, Antonín, was also a composer.
Life
Wranitzky was born in Neureisch ( Nová Říše) in Habsburg Mora ...
featured it in orchestral variations, in variations for
xylophone
The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the ...
, strings, trumpet and drums, and as the trio to the
menuetto
A minuet (; also spelled menuet) is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in time. The English word was adapted from the Italian ''minuetto'' and the French ''menuet''.
The term also describes the musical form that accompa ...
of his Symphony Op. 33, No 3.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (14 November 177817 October 1837) was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the Transition from Classical to Romantic music, transition from the Classical period (music), Classical to the Romantic ...
wrote S 47, WoO 2 – Variations for orchestra on "O du lieber Augustin" in C major. The clarinettist and composer
Anton Stadler
Anton Paul Stadler (28 June 1753, in Bruck an der Leitha – 15 June 1812, in Vienna) was an Austrian clarinet and basset horn player for whom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote, amongst others, both his Clarinet Quintet (K 581) and Clarinet Concert ...
used it in his first Caprice for solo clarinet.
The tune appears quoted (recognisably, but in a dissonant context) in the midst of the second movement of
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
's
second quartet, written a month before the height of Schoenberg's marital crisis. An additional significance attaches to the quotation in view of the quartet being the work in which Schoenberg decisively abandons the traditional key-system and embraces consistent
atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. ''Atonality'', in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a s ...
.
A Scots song, "
Did You Ever See a Lassie?" is set to the same tune:
Did ye ever see a lassie, a lassie, a lassie
Did ye ever see a lassie gae this way and that?
Gae this way and that way, gae this way and that way,
Did ye ever see a lassie gae this way and that?"
In Estonia there is a whole family of stereotypical melodies, probably originated from the Estonian bagpipe-tunes of the 17th century at the latest. The kinship of the Estonian bagpipe dance tunes with the Augustin melody is clear, although verification of origin, in one way or another, is impossible due to the lack of written material. The Estonian Augustin-melody family includes, for example; "Puusaluu" (from Kihnu island), "Las aga mede vana Mari tulla" (from Tori), "Nüüd algavad noodilood" (from Muhu island) etc. Nowadays there is also known among Estonians a toast song, that is sung before drinking: "Selle peale vanad eestlased võtsid üks naps" (And upon that, the old Estonians took a schnapps).
The melody is also the base for: "
The More We Get Together
"The More We Get Together" is a popular English children's song, originally written for a British charitable organisation for children, claimed authorship by Irving King in 1926, based on an old Viennese tune, "Oh du lieber Augustin", like" Did You ...
" a traditional American folk song and popular children's song dating to the 18th or 19th century.
The melody is also used in "Fat Turkeys", a children's song sung during the Thanksgiving season in Canada and the United States. Lyrics are:
Oh, gobble, gobble, gobble, fat turkeys, fat turkeys;
Oh, gobble, gobble, gobble, fat turkeys are we.
We walk very proudly and gobble so loudly,
Oh, gobble, gobble, gobble, fat turkeys are we.
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer, musician and actor. The first multimedia star, he was one of the most popular and influential musical artists of the 20th century worldwide. He was a ...
included the song in a medley on his 1961 album ''
101 Gang Songs''.
It appears at the end of the song
Spinning Wheel
A spinning wheel is a device for spinning thread or yarn from fibres. It was fundamental to the cotton textile industry prior to the Industrial Revolution. It laid the foundations for later machinery such as the spinning jenny and spinning f ...
, written by
David Clayton-Thomas
David Clayton-Thomas (born David Henry Thomsett, 13 September 1941) is a Grammy Award-winning Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist of the American band Blood, Sweat & Tears. Clayton-Thomas has been inducte ...
and performed by
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Blood, Sweat & Tears (also known as "BS&T") is a jazz rock music group founded in New York City in 1967, noted for a combination of brass with rock instrumentation. In addition to original music, the group has performed popular songs by Laura Ny ...
.
The melody is also used in "Daar wordt aan de deur geklopt", a Dutch children's song for the celebration of
Saint Nicholas Day
Saint Nicholas Day, also called the Feast of Saint Nicholas, observed on 5 December or on 6 December in Western Christian countries, and on 19 December in Eastern Christian countries using the old church Calendar, is the feast day of Saint Nic ...
.
See also
*''
Beloved Augustin'' (1940 film)
References
External links
*
A version and its translation
{{Authority control
German folk songs
German-language songs
17th century in Vienna
Street performance
Songs about musicians
Cultural depictions of folk musicians
Cultural depictions of Austrian men
17th-century songs
de:Marx Augustin#O du lieber Augustin
pl:Epidemia dżumy w Wiedniu (1679)#Lieber Augustin