Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: A Song History

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The words began as "The Star," a poem by Jane Taylor (1783–1824) in Rhymes for the Nursery, the collection she wrote with her older sister Ann and which Darton & Harvey brought out in London in 1806. A first edition at the Morgan Library & Museum is catalogued as the first printing of the poem.[1] The Ballad Index, citing the Opies' Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, also gives 1806 as its earliest date, and its editor points to the verse's many parodies as a sign of its popularity, Lewis Carroll's little bat being the best known.[2]

Henry Farrer watercolor of a snowy hillside and stream under a moonlit sky streaked with clouds

Henry Farrer, Winter Scene in Moonlight, watercolor and gouache, 1869. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A moonlit night sky; it has no connection to the song.

The tune is older, and it reached the poem separately. It is the melody of the French song "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman." Sources differ on the earliest date: the Ballad Index, following Fuld, dates its first appearance to 1761, while the preface to Henle's edition of Mozart's variations says only that the melody is documented from the 1760s at the latest. Henle adds that its origin is uncertain, since it rests on simple patterns common across Europe, and that the French words were probably fitted to it somewhat later.[2][3] According to Fuld, as reported in the Ballad Index, Taylor's verses and the French tune were joined, apparently in 1838, after the melody had carried other English words. The same melody carries the alphabet song and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"; the sheep rhyme is older than the melody, dating to about 1744, and Fuld puts its pairing with this tune at 1879.[2][4]

Mozart wrote twelve keyboard variations on the tune, K. 265 (300e). Köchel dated them to 1776 and Alfred Einstein to 1778, during Mozart's stay in Paris, but study of Mozart's handwriting and the paper of the surviving autograph fragments now dates them to 1781–82, when Mozart was living in Vienna. The Viennese publisher Christoph Torricella first issued them in 1785, and Artaria's 1787 reprint was the first edition to name the French song on its title page.[3][5]

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Sources

  1. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Rhymes for the Nursery" (Ann and Jane Taylor, London: Darton & Harvey, 1806), Record ID 85839.
  2. Traditional Ballad Index: "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".
  3. G. Henle Verlag: Mozart, "12 Variations on 'Ah, vous dirai-je Maman' K. 265 (300e)", HN 165, preface.
  4. Traditional Ballad Index: "Baa Baa Black Sheep".
  5. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Twelve Variations on the French folk song 'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman,' K. 265" (Mozart exhibition audio guide).