Musical Greetings for Mother's Day

Friday, May 6, 2016

This Sunday, Mother’s Day will be celebrated in dozens of countries around the world, including here in Germany. Cards and flowers are usually a must on the second Sunday in May, but at RISM we have some suggestions for brightening the day with music.

Mother’s Day is only about 100 years old. It began in the United States and spread throughout the world, though many other countries maintain their own, older celebrations of motherhood. It should come as no surprise that music about the holiday in the RISM online catalog are from the last century. In Switzerland, there is a sketch called “Pour la fête des mères” by Carlo Boller (1896-1952; RISM ID no. 402009535), “Zum Muttertag” by Otto Rehm (1887-1971; RISM ID no. 403013726), and “Heim zur Mutter” by Alfred Leonz Gassmann (1876-1962; RISM ID no. 403006358).

The Swiss have taken the lead in compositions for Mother’s Day, at least in RISM, but the RISM catalog can still uncover non-holiday-specific music that honors mothers. A keyword search will help you here. Searching for mother, Mutter, mère, and other variations will give you many results to sort through, but lots of these are for sacred music that refer to the motherhood of Mary. Using the more familiar names mama or mamma will help retrieve more music that deals with the relationship between mothers and their kin:

A more targeted search for Mutterliebe (mother’s love) can find the following:

We hope that this music will help you serenade your mother on this special day!

Image: “Dem Mütterlein!” Postcard, undated. Universität Osnabrück, Historische Bildpostkarten collection. Via Europeana. (CC BY-NC-SA)

Share Tweet Email

Category: Events


Browse the news archive by category below or use the search box above.

Categories

Top posts

- Joseph Bologne’s “L’Amant Anonyme”
- The Public Domain in 2023
- Scott Joplin and the St. Louis World’s Fair
- The Vienna State Opera in 1955
- Elizaveta, Elisabeth, and Elizabeth

Featured posts

- A Word about RISM
- Chopin Heritage in Open Access
- Sarah Levy
- Discovering Vivaldi Sources
- Finding Unica in RISM

Send us your news

Share your news with RISM and reach an international community of scholars, musicians, librarians, and archivists. Find out more here.

Copyright

All news posts are by RISM Editorial Center staff unless otherwise noted. Reuse of RISM’s own texts is permitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In all other cases, please contact the individual author.

CC_license