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| The words of the first parody of the song, which remains best known to French children even today. |
Perhaps the best-known
French melody in the English-speaking world, if not the whole world, is a
French pastoral song, the melody of which dates to 1740. The tune became
popular, and was first published with suggested lyrics in 1761, linked to a
love poem called “La confidence” (“The Confidence”, in English). The
first verse went like this:
Ah! Vous dirai-je
Maman
Ce qui cause mon
tourment?
Depuis que j’ai vu
Clitandre,
Me regarder d’un air
tendre ;
Mon cœur dit à chaque
instant,
«Peut-on vivre sans
amant?»
In English, it reads
like this:
Ah! Shall I tell
you, Mama,
What just drives me
crazy?
Since I saw Clitandre
Look at me in that
tender way,
My heart said at that
instant,
“Can you live without
loving?”
In case that doesn’t
ring any bells, don’t sweat it. “La confidence” is not especially well
remembered today, and I’m probably one of the few people who have ever tried to
translate it into English. (I’m not bragging about that. It’s not
the most complicated piece, to say the least.) Oddly, it was not the
original but a parody of the original that caught on, and is still a popular
children’s song in France today:
Ah! Vous dirai-je
Maman,
Ce qui cause mon
tourment?
Papa veut que je
raisonne
Comme une grande
personne.
Moi, je dis que les
bonbons
Valent mieux que la
raison.
In English:
Ah! Shall I tell
you, Mama,
What just drives me
crazy?
Papa wants that I be
reasonable,
Like a grown-up.
Me, I say that candy
Is worth more than
reason.
It loses something in
the translation, no doubt. The funny part was that the parody was
published as “La confidence naïve”, or “The Naïve Confidence”, turning a
heartfelt poem about a young woman trying to sort out her love life into a
child complaining to his mother about how his father keeps asking him to grow
up already. The connection to the original lyrics is probably lost on
modern French children and even modern French adults, but it must have gotten a
good laugh in the 1760s.
This song achieved
international attention in 1785, when a 29-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
published his “Twelve Variations on ‘Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman!”.
Mozart was probably exposed to the song while staying in Paris a few
years earlier.
By 1806, the tune found
its way to England, and poet Jane Taylor wrote five verses of a poem called
“The Star”, which were no doubt designed to fit this tune:
Twinkle, twinkle, little
star,
How I wonder what you
are!
Up above the world so
high,
Like a diamond in the
sky.
Soon after, “The
Alphabet Song” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” were also fitted to the melody.
The German Christmas carol “Morgen Kommt der Weihnachtsmann” uses it as
well, as do songs in Spanish, Dutch, Turkish and Hungarian. “The Alphabet
Song” was copyrighted in the United States in 1835, featuring Noah Webster’s
newly promoted pronunciation of the final letter, Z, as “zee” instead of “zed”.
Webster’s idea was that the simplified pronunciation was more intuitive,
and thus promoted literacy better. Whether that was true or not, it sure
lent itself to the rhyme scheme better than the traditional pronunciation.
The song has been
parodied in English a number of times. Lewis Carroll’s famous “Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Bat” debuted in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in 1865 and
is still one of the best-known parodies, but there have been others. Here
are a few:
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat” performed by
Robert Helpmann in the film “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, 1972:
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth” by Leonard Nimoy:
A jazzy “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” by Alvin and the Chipmunks:
Science Groove gets a little more technical with “Twinkle, Twinkle,
T2*”:
“Twelve Variations on ‘Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman” by Mozart:
And here’s the original parody of “Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman!”:
This is by no means a
definitive list of versions and parodies. The song’s been around for
about a quarter of a millennium. A lot can be done over that much time,
so have a look around—I’m sure you’ll find more!
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