Dvorák's Gypsy Melodies is a cycle of 10 songs composed for the tenor Gustav Walter, who sang with the Vienna Court Opera and was a great admirer of Dvorák. The composer used Walter's own German translations of the original Czech texts as the basis of his settings. While exact dates for these songs are unknown, it is thought that they were written in just a few day at the end of February 1880. The songs display Dvorák's ever-increasing skill at vocal composition; their vocal melodies are supple and natural, and the piano accompaniment is often interesting—vivacious and dance-like. Despite the cycle's title, the songs are not written in an authentic gypsy idiom, but they do reflect in general the character of gypsy music, filtered through Dvorák's own compositional style.

© All Music Guide

4.Songs My Mother Taught Me

Filled with warm emotion, this sentimental song, harmonized in four parts, has become a favorite of vocal quartets, glee clubs, and concert choirs. The piece was written and first published in America in 1880 shortly before the composer visited the United States.

The melody rolls between three notes (in the standard key of B flat major: B flat, A, G, B flat, A, G), while the harmony moves from the tonic root to the relative minor (B flat major to G minor chords). The style of the music shows some influence from Bohemian gypsy music in the octave leaps of the melody in the second measure and their skipping (eighth note, quarter note, eighth note) rhythm. The harmony moves to the supertonic (the rich C minor seventh chord). The third and fourth measures repeat the melodic motion of the first two measures, only a step lower, and on the dominant, augmented dominant and tonic chords (F seventh, F aug. 5, B flat major seventh). The six-chord progression of this first phrase (setting the first four lines of the English rhyming text, see below) was used throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for hundreds of popular songs, and this familiarity may partially account for the song's continued popularity.

The second four-measure phrase ascends scalewise, and then descends the same way with one slight skipping rhythm. This phrase ends on the dominant rather than the tonic note and, in contrast to the romantic and symmetrically satisfying first phrase, seems folk-tune like and leaves the listener hanging.

The next verse repeats the same music until, after the sixth measure, two new measures are added which give the feeling that the music will actually definitely cadence. Instead, the melody is still left hanging on the dominant note, this preceded by two fast grace notes, in a kind of folk-style glottal sweep. These extra measures have also made the structure of the song interestingly and subtly asymmetrical.



Rhyming English translation by Natalia Macfarren



Songs my mother taught me,

In the days long vanished;

Seldom from her eyelids

Were the teardrops banished.

Now I teach my children,

Each melodious measure.

Oft the tears are flowing,

Oft they flow from my memory's treasure.



German text by Adolph Heyduk



Als die alte Mutter mich noch lehrte singen,

tränen in den Wimpern gar so oft ihr hingen.

Jetzt, wo ich die Kleinen selber üb im Sange,

rie-selt's in den Bart oft, rie-selt's oft

von der braunen Wange.



English prose translation by this writer



When my old mother taught me to sing,

tears would very often hang in her eyelashes.

Now when I myself practice songs with the little ones,

in my beard tears trickle, they often trickle

to my brown cheek.

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