Music for Mother’s Day
In honor of Mother’s Day, we present a playlist of music inspired by mothers and centered on themes of motherhood in its various forms, from lullabies and bedtime stories to poignant remembrances of mothers who have passed.
Florence Price – “To My Little Son”
Florence Price (1887–1953) wrote “To My Little Son” late in life, likely around 1950, although it was inspired by much earlier events. The song is an homage to her son Tommy, who was born in 1920 but, tragically, did not survive infancy. The poem by Julia Johnson Davis sees a mother looking into the face of her young son, imagining the kind of man he will grow up to be and wondering if, when he’s older, she will still be able to see her baby in his adult face. That Price wrote the song 30 years after losing her infant son, whose future she never got to see, makes it that much more poignant.
Richard Strauss – “Meinem Kinde,” “Wiegenlied,” & “Muttertändelei”
Richard Strauss often wove elements of his domestic life into his music, as in the tone poems Symphonica Domestica and Ein Heldenleben. In the years immediately after his wife, Pauline de Ahna, gave birth to their only son, Franz, he wrote three songs on the theme of motherhood. The first, composed in 1897, is “Meinem Kinde” (“To My Child”), a tender lullaby with gentle, rocking triplets. The following year, he wrote “Wiegenlied” (“Lullaby”), featuring a simple, consoling melody over shimmering accompaniment. In 1899, he penned “Muttertändelei” (“Mother Chatter”), a comic song about a new mother’s joy as she praises the perfect features of her baby.
Just look at my beautiful child,
With long, golden locks,
Blue eyes and rosy cheeks
People, do you also have one like it? People, no you have not!
Maurice Ravel – Mother Goose Suite
While Maurice Ravel was not a parent himself, he was a loving figure in the lives of his friends’ children. He originally wrote the Mother Goose Suite between 1908 and 1910 as a five-movement suite for piano four hands for the children of his friends Ida and Cipa Godebski. Ravel would often visit the family at their country house and play with the children, Mimi and Jean. One of the children reminisced, “Ravel used to tell me marvelous stories. I would sit on his knee and he would begin, ‘once upon a time…’ And it was Laideronette, Beauty and the Beast, and the adventures of a poor mouse that he had made up for me.” A year after the work’s premiere in 1910, Ravel expanded and orchestrated the suite, which is now the most popular form of the piece.
Johannes Brahms – Ein deutsches Requiem: “Ihr habt nun traurigkeit”
Profoundly shaken by the loss of his mother, Christiane, in 1865, Johannes Brahms set to work on his German Requiem(Ein deutsches Requiem) to help process his grief. The fifth movement, “Ihr habt nun traurigkeit,” is the most direct memorial to his mother. The text, based on Isaiah 66:13, begins, “You now have sorrow; but I shall see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one shall take from you. I will console you, as one is consoled by his mother.” Set for soprano solo soaring softly high over the orchestra and chorus, the movement is one of the most poignant and personal moments of the whole Requiem.
William Grant Still – “Mother and Child”
One of William Grant Still’s most popular works is the second movement of his Suite for Violin and Piano (1943). Each movement of the suite was inspired by the work of a different African American visual artist. The second movement, “Mother and Child,” was inspired by a 1932 chalk drawing by San Francisco-based artist Sargent Johnson. It depicts a Black mother looking forward, hand to her head, as her child embraces her. The mother’s expression is tired but also content. Still’s “Mother and Child” is deceptively simple but alternates gently between major and minor harmonies, capturing the sometimes-complex relationships between mothers and their children. Still’s relationship with his own mother was complicated, as he said, “I rarely missed passing through a day without a licking. But I needed them.”
Josef Suk – About Mother
About Mother is a suite of five piano pieces by Czech composer Josef Suk, written for his young son, Josef, in 1907. He composed the suite two years after the sudden passing of his wife and the young Josef’s mother, Otilie, at just 27 years old. Otilie, the daughter of Suk’s composition teacher and close mentor Antonín Dvořák, was a gifted pianist herself and had even composed a few piano pieces. Suk wrote About Mother to help his son remember his late mother. Far from morose, the miniatures present tender remembrances of Otilie as a young girl and later as a mother in “What Mother Sang at Night to her Sick Child.”
Antonín Dvořák – “Songs My Mother Taught Me”
Speaking of Antonín Dvořák, any collection of music for mother’s day would be incomplete without Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” It originally appeared as the fourth song of seven in the set Gypsy Songs, op. 55 (1880). Today, it is often heard in transcription for various solo instruments. The short but poignant poem by Adolf Heyduk explores the emotional power of music as a means of connecting us with our forebears.
When my old mother taught me songs to sing,
Tears would well strangely in her eyes.
Now my brown cheeks are wet with tears,
When I teach the children how to sing and play!
NB: Check out this setting by Charles Ives of Natalie Macfarren’s English translation of the same poem:
