The "Großvatertanz" (Grandfather Dance) is a 17th-century German traditional dance folk tune from the region of
Saxony
Saxony, officially the Free State of Saxony, is a landlocked state of Germany, bordering the states of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Bavaria, as well as the countries of Poland and the Czech Republic. Its capital is Dresden, and ...
.
History
The song was first mentioned in print in 1717 by the German
ballet master
A ballet master (also balletmaster, ballet mistress, ''premier maître de ballet'' or ''premier maître de ballet en chef'') is an employee of a ballet company who is responsible for the level of competence of the dancers in their company. In mo ...
Gottfried Taubert (1670–1746), but was known before.
New lyrics to the first part of the tune were written by
Klamer Eberhard Karl Schmidt in 1794 and
August Friedrich Ernst Langbein in 1812, both "lengthy and dull pieces of ornate poetry" (
Franz Magnus Böhme, 1886).
[; Vol. II: Musikbeilagen]
p. 214–215
/ref> (1766–1853) in 1823 composed a new tune to Langbein's lyrics, for which he has erroneously been claimed to be the real author.
For many years, it was regularly played and danced at the end of wedding celebrations, and became known as the ("finale", turn-out).
Melody and text
The original melody has three parts:
# 8 bars in time, slow
# 4 bars of a different theme in time, fast (repeated)
# 4 bars, a variation of the second theme (repeated).
\language "deutsch"
\header
\layout
musik = \relative d'
\addlyrics
\score
\score
Source
And when grandfather took grandmother
grandfather was a groom,
and grandmother was a bride,
they were both married together.
With you and me into the featherbed,
with you and me into the hay;
no feather will pierce you there
nor will a flea bite you.
Quotations
J. S. Bach quoted the fast part of the tune in the duet "Nu, Mieke, gib dein Guschel immer her" ( Saxon dialect for "Now, Mary, give me your mouth") in the 1742 ''Bauernkantate'' (Peasant Cantata), BWV 212. to illustrate the girl's reservations about the man's presumed further intentions ("With you and me into the featherbed").
The tune became so associated with marriage that when Louis Spohr
Louis Spohr (, 5 April 178422 October 1859), baptized Ludewig Spohr, later often in the modern German form of the name Ludwig was a German composer, violinist and conductor.
Highly regarded during his lifetime, Spohr composed ten symphonies, ...
wrote a Festival March for the wedding of Princess Marie of Hesse to the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
Saxe-Meiningen ( ; ) was one of the Saxon duchies held by the Ernestine duchies, Ernestine line of the House of Wettin, located in the southwest of the present-day Germany, German state of Thuringia.
Established in 1681, by partition of the Ern ...
in 1825, he was required to quote
Quote may refer to:
Computing
* String literals, computer programming languages' facility for embedding text in the source code
* Quoting in Lisp, the Lisp programming language's notion of quoting
* Quoted-printable, encoding method for data tr ...
the "Großvatertanz" in it.
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann (; ; 8 June 181029 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic music, Romantic era. He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber ...
quoted the "Großvatertanz" in a number of works, among them:
* the final section of '' Papillons'', Op. 2 (1831)
* the final section ("") of '' Carnaval'', Op. 9 (1834–35), where he labels the theme (Theme from the 17th century).
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popula ...
also quotes the tune in act 1 of his ballet ''The Nutcracker
''The Nutcracker'' (, ), Opus number, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet (conceived as a '; ) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination featuring a Nutcracker doll. Th ...
'' (1892). It appears at the end of the Christmas party. Tchaikovsky was a great admirer of Schumann's music, but it is not clear whether this was meant as some sort of tribute to Schumann or simply as an appropriate tune to use in music depicting the winding up of a happy family event.
More recently, the German composer Jörg Widmann has used the "Großvatertanz" in his Third String Quartet, "Jagdquartett" (2003), to evoke a hunt.
References
{{Reflist
German folk dances
German folk songs
Wedding songs
Baroque dance