Abstract
Musical commemoration of birthdays is a subject ripe for exploration. This essay takes as its departure point two little-known examples from Johannes Brahms and his friend Julius Grimm in the 1850s, conceived as private jokes and personal birthday gifts. These pieces reveal an array of humorous musical techniques reflecting the joviality of the composers’ relationships and the conviviality of the commemorated occasions, provide a humanizing glimpse into Brahms’s personal relationships, and offer insight into musical practices surrounding birthdays in their time and place. The remainder of the chapter contextualizes these works within a larger tradition of musical birthday commemorations, public and private, in nineteenth-century Germany and elsewhere and highlights ways in which birthday music of the period resonates with broader cultural trends of the time.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations are my own.
- 2.
For more on pieces written for friends in Brahms’s circle, see Berry (2014).
- 3.
In antiquity, the practice seems to have been limited mainly to royalty and nobility, as the births of others were not consistently recorded. In about the twelfth century, the Catholic church began the more widespread and exact recording of births, but at least until the Reformation, the celebration of birthdays was considered unholy, with pagan associations. Following the Reformation, it became more common once again to celebrate birthdays of important figures, particularly royalty (see Chudacoff 1989, 118 and 126–130; Argetsinger 1992, 180ff; Mikalson 2012; “Birthday” 2007; “Birthday Cake Candles” 2003; Jernow 2004).
- 4.
The manuscripts are among the holdings of Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (mss mus. Sch. C. 105, C. 106, and D. 264).
- 5.
The sisters, working actively to demonstrate the value of early childhood education, had established a kindergarten together in Louisville. The school was called the Louisville Kindergarten Training School, and Patty was its principal. Patty, the younger of the two, became a professor of education at Columbia University in the early twentieth century; Mildred went on to become a church organist and developed particular interest in African American spirituals (see Pleck 2000, 292, n. 32; Fuld 2000, 267).
- 6.
- 7.
A rare copy of the piece exists in the British Library, St. Pancras.
- 8.
The reviewer claims that presumably because the work was “dedicated to a lady,” it was written “as simply as possible.”
- 9.
A copy of Barry’s score, also rare, likewise exists in the British Library, St. Pancras. The tradition of whimsical birthday songs for public consumption continued to evolve in the twentieth century. Examples include “Another Candle on Your Birthday Cake,” a fox-trot by Peter de Rose with lyrics by Charles Tobias and Carl Field, published in 1931 and premiered by Paul Whiteman’s band (De Rose et al. 1931); the similarly titled “Put Another Candle on My Birthday Cake” (a.k.a., the “Birthday Cake Polka”), a recurring theme on the children’s television programs hosted by John Rovick (“Sherriff John”) in the 1950s–1960s (McLellan 2012); and a “Happy Birthday Polka” by Dewey Bergman and Jack Segal (Bergman and Segal 1947), recorded by Sons of the Pioneers in 1947 (Sons of the Pioneers 2005).
- 10.
One may cite any number of more recent tunes written for birthdays of specific friends, particularly friends who are composers or musicians themselves, some of which do make more specific reference to their recipients. Contemporary composer Juan Orrego-Salas composed Variations for a Quiet Man, for Clarinet and Piano, op. 79, in honor of the 85th birthday of his friend and former teacher Aaron Copland in 1985 (Orrego-Salas 1986; see also “Score” 2019; “Relationships” 2019). Among the holdings of Boston University’s Gotlieb Research Center is a short musical composition on a handwritten birthday note from Leonard Bernstein to his friend Irene Mayer Selznick (ex-wife of David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind, and herself a producer of theatrical productions including A Streetcar Named Desire) on her 75th birthday in 1982 (Bernstein 1982). In 2001–2002, Samuel Adler wrote a more complex example: Four Composer Portraits: Birthday Cards for Solo Piano in tribute to his friends, composers Milton Babbitt, Ned Rorem, Gunther Schuller, and David Diamond. Not only is the general style of each Portrait intended to evoke the appropriate composer’s own music, but the main musical themes are based on modified musical spellings of the honorees’ first names, much as Grimm spells Brahms’s name in his own birthday polka (Adler 2006, 2008).
- 11.
The piece also perhaps presages the formalization and commercialization of Mother’s Day in Western cultures in the early twentieth century, although there were less commercialized celebrations of Muttertag in Germany dating back to the Middle Ages; see “Muttertag” (2019).
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Sholes, J. (2020). Music for Birthdays: Commemorative Birthday Pieces in Johannes Brahms’s Circle (1853–1854) and Elsewhere. In: Grenier, K., Mushal, A. (eds) Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37647-5_4
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