Joy And Temperance And Repose: A Song History

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The words of this round go back to the German poet Friedrich von Logau, whose 1654 Breslau collection Deutscher Sinn-Getichte Drey Tausend (three thousand German epigrams) contains a two-line verse titled "Die beste Artzney," or "The Best Medicine," which names joy, moderation and rest as the remedies worth having.[1] The thought is an old one: in a 2008 commentary in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Maurizio Bifulco, Magda Marasco and Simona Pisanti point to a Latin aphorism opening the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, the chief text of the medieval medical school at Salerno, which offers a cheerful mind, rest and a moderate diet in place of physicians.[2] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put Logau's couplet into English among his "Poetic Aphorisms" from Logau's Sinngedichte, under the title "The Best Medicines," and the round takes its name from his first line.[3][4]

Engraving of the figure of Temperance surrounded by people at work and study

Philips Galle, Temperance, from The Virtues, engraving, about 1559–60. An allegory of Temperance, one of the three remedies the round names; it has no connection to the round.

Mark Gilston includes it in Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers, a 43-page book of rounds, canons and circular songs that work well when several players take the same piece but come in at different times.[4] The sources consulted here do not say who first set Longfellow's lines as a round.[3][4] Logau's epigram has also had a separate life in German: Herbert Beuerle (1911-1994), cantor at the Burckhardthaus in Gelnhausen from 1952 and the composer of nearly 900 canons, set it in 1979 as a three-voice canon of his own, in a version that names work rather than joy as the first remedy.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Joy And Temperance And Repose"

Sources

  1. Deutsches Textarchiv: "Friedrich von Logau, Deutscher Sinn-Getichte Drey Tausend (Breslau, 1654)".
  2. Medievalists.net: "Maurizio Bifulco, Magda Marasco and Simona Pisanti, Dietary Recommendations in the Medieval Medical School of Salerno (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2008)".
  3. Project Gutenberg: "The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow".
  4. Mark Gilston: "Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers".
  5. Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek / Landeskirchliches Archiv Kassel: "Du wirst staunen, du wirst lachen ... Der Kosmos in den Kanons des Herbert Beuerle".
  6. Image: Philips Galle, Temperance, from The Virtues, engraving, about 1559–60. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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