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:
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Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s song “An die Frau Mama”
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Karl Gramm: “Die liebsten Silbenpaare sind mir Mama”
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Gottlob Gottwalt Hunger’s “Auf das Bildniß einer geliebten Mutter”
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Teodoro Riccio: “Mama mia cara dolc’e bella”
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Rudolf Förster: “Das hat Mama gesagt”
A more targeted search for Mutterliebe (mother’s love) can find the following:
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Gustav Dippe’s opera Mutterliebe
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Heinrich Pfeil’s partsong “Mutterliebe”
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Johann Christian Friedrich Schneider’s partsong “Mutterliebe”
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Leo Kunz’s melodrama Mutterliebe und Mutterlob
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)
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