Oh How Lovely Is The Evening: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening" is the English version of a German round, "O wie wohl ist mir am Abend." Music educator Margaret Jenks, in a teaching plan now hosted among the Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance materials on the Wisconsin Music Educators Association website, describes it as a traditional canon by an unknown composer whose words were first German, and notes that its simple text imitates the sound of ringing bells.[1] In the sources consulted here, no composer and no date of origin could be confirmed. The German song was being printed for American schoolchildren by 1876, when it appeared as number 81 in 349 Lieder für Schule und Haus in den Vereinigten Staaten, a German-language songbook aimed at the elementary and middle classes of city schools and at rural parish schools.[2]

Worthington Whittredge painting of golden evening light glowing through a forest of tall trees

Worthington Whittredge, Evening in the Woods, oil on canvas, 1876. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its evening light; it has no connection to the round.

In English it turned up in mid-twentieth-century songbooks and sing-along records. It appears in a 1955 edition of Henry W. Simon's A Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,[3] John Raitt sang it in a medley on the LP Songs the Kids Brought Home from Camp (1960),[4] and Arthur Godfrey recorded it alongside "Two Birds" on Sing-A-Round with Arthur Godfrey (1961).[5] It remains a classroom piece: Jenks's plan, first presented to the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2008, suggests it for children who are new to reading music and observes that it has been published in many tongues, among them Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian and Russian.[1]

Find books with Oh How Lovely Is The Evening for sale →

Sources

  1. Wisconsin Music Educators Association (CMP materials): Margaret Jenks, "CMP Teaching Plan: O How Lovely is the Evening".
  2. Hymnary.org: "349 Lieder für Schule und Haus in den Vereinigten Staaten (1876), No. 81".
  3. Internet Archive: Henry W. Simon, ed., "A Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols" (Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
  4. Internet Archive: John Raitt, "Songs the Kids Brought Home from Camp" (Warner Bros., 1960).
  5. Internet Archive: Arthur Godfrey, "Sing-A-Round with Arthur Godfrey" (Capitol, 1961).