Ex. 11-5: Songs My Mother Taught Me

No. 4 from Dvořák's Gypsy Songs (Op. 55), composed in 1880. It is Dvořák's most famous song. In Adolf Heyduk's poem, an old mother taught her child songs long ago, with tears in her eyes; now the grown child, teaching those same songs to their own children, weeps too.

The song was written for Gustav Walter, a tenor at the Vienna Court Opera. It first appeared in 1880 in German — Heyduk made the German translation himself — with the Czech and English words added the next year. By this time Dvořák's name was spreading beyond Bohemia, helped by Johannes Brahms, who admired his music and had recommended him to the publisher Fritz Simrock.

The song came at a hard time in Dvořák's life. Between 1875 and 1877 he had lost three young children — a baby daughter at two days old, a second daughter at eleven months, and a son of three. He poured that grief most directly into his Stabat Mater; this song came a few years later, in 1880.

The song has an unusual look on the page: the voice is written in 2/4 while the piano moves in 6/8. The bars and their two main beats fall together, but the voice splits each beat in two while the piano splits it in three — so an eighth note isn't even the same length in the two parts. This two-against-three gives the song its gentle, wistful sway.

Fritz Kreisler transcribed it for violin and piano (published 1914), which further spread its popularity.

The American composer Charles Ives wrote his own setting of the same poem about fifteen years later, using its English singing text (traditionally credited to Natalia Macfarren) and dedicating his song to his own mother. (Ex. 6-13: Songs My Mother Taught Me by Charles Ives)

From the album Songs My Mother Taught Me by Magdalena Kožená and Malcolm Martineau (2008)
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