Before Longfellow

Long before Longfellow penned his verses about the village smithy, rural Englishmen were singing a hippety-hopping tune to the words:

Underneath the spreading chestnut tree

I loved her and she loved me.

There she used to sit upon my knee

'Neath the spreading chestnut tree.

Last year, when King George VI visited a boys' camp in England, the boys entertained him by singing it with gestures, and (before a battery of newsreel Cameras) the King himself joined in with a right royal will (see cut). Weeks later the newsreel reached a small cinema theatre at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. In the audience was a jumpy, pink-eyed little Czech composer named Jaromir Weinberger, world-famed for his lilting opera Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer. Composer Weinberger was much struck. Said he: "I liked this whole scene very much and I said to myself: 'This is the theme for which you, Jaromir, shall write variations and a fugue.'"

Last spring, while Hitler was marching on Czecho-Slovakia, Czech Weinberger, who had scurried off to the U. S., put the finishing touches to his variations. In Manhattan last week, John Barbirolli and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave them a first performance in Carnegie Hall. The Philharmonic's first-nighters found they had to chase Weinberger's spreading chestnuts through a thick foliage of neat counterpoint, got the tune hurled at them forwards, backwards, upsidedown, finally lost themselves in the fugue which ended up sounding like a CzechoSlovakian polka. In the score, when the English tune .went backwards, Composer Weinberger had carefully labeled it with the Latin words More Hebraeorum (in the Hebrew manner)* with the explanation: THGIR EHT MORF DAER ESAELP TFEL EHT OT

Whichever way it came at them, the staid Carnegie Hall audience liked Composer Weinberger's version as much as King George had enjoyed the original.

* Hebrew, like most Oriental languages, is read from right to left.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.