Santa Lucia: A Song History

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"Santa Lucia" is named after a quarter of Naples, and Norway's national encyclopedia classes its melody as an Italian barcarolle, or boatman's song.[1] The city's tourism office presents the quarter's church as the spiritual centre of an old fishing district bound up with the gulf for centuries, and states that Teodoro Cottrau found his inspiration for the song on its steps.[2] The Naples publisher B. Girard & Co. first issued the song in 1849 with Neapolitan words only; IMSLP says it won wide popularity once translated into Italian, and credits that translation to Enrico Cossovich.[3]

Early sepia photograph of a waterfront street in Naples lined with tall buildings below a fortress

Calvert Richard Jones, Santa Lucia, Naples, salted paper prints from paper negatives, 1845–46. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The Santa Lucia waterfront a few years before the song was published.

Who wrote the tune is unsettled, and sources differ.[4][1] The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani treats it as Cottrau's own composition of 1848, set to verses by E. Cossovich, and even hears echoes of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia in it.[4] The Norwegian encyclopedia points out that Cottrau (1827–1879) both collected folk songs and wrote his own, leaving it open whether he composed this one or simply published a folk melody.[1] The score archive IMSLP reports that James J. Fuld's The Book of World-famous Music has Cottrau merely writing down and arranging the song, and that some sources credit Cottrau with the Italian words and A. Longo with the music.[3] Sweden's Nordiska museet calls the melody Italian, "probably with a folk origin."[5] When Enrico Caruso recorded it in Italian for Victor in New York on 20 March 1916, with a mandolin in the accompaniment, the record was labelled a Neapolitan folk song and Cottrau was credited as arranger.[6]

The song took on a second life in Scandinavia, where, as the Dizionario Biografico notes, Swedes adopted it as a hymn to St Lucy.[4] According to Nordiska museet, new Swedish words were written in the 1920s, and a Lucia contest run by a Stockholm newspaper in 1928 helped make the December 13 celebration a mass-media event.[5] The oldest Swedish text still in use is by Sigrid Elmblad (1924), another followed from Arvid Rosén (1928), and a Norwegian version based on Rosén's appeared around 1954; today candle-lit Lucia processions in schools and kindergartens sing it while handing out lussekatter buns.[1]

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Sources

  1. Store norske leksikon: "Lucia-sangen".
  2. Napoli tourism office (DMO Napoli): "Church of Santa Lucia".
  3. IMSLP Petrucci Music Library: "Santa Lucia (Cottrau, Teodoro)".
  4. Treccani, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 30 (1984): "Cottrau, Teodoro" (Raoul Meloncelli).
  5. Nordiska museet: "Lucia".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Victor matrix C-17344. Santa Lucia / Enrico Caruso".