Birthday Variations
From royal flattery to Wagner’s idea of a morning surprise
I turned another year older yesterday, which is always a strange little annual event. Lovely, obviously. There was family, food, messages, cake, the whole thing. But birthdays also have a way of making you briefly aware of time passing in a way that is both sentimental and slightly alarming. Why does it come faster every year?
And because I apparently can’t experience anything without turning it into a playlist, I started thinking about birthday music.
Not party music, exactly, I mean music written for actual birthdays. Pieces composed as gifts, gestures, royal flattery, private jokes, family moments, or, in some cases, full orchestral statements of ‘many happy returns’.
The obvious place to start is the birthday song itself. The one sung in restaurants with varying levels of commitment. The one that starts confidently and then immediately turns into a group panic about where the next note actually lives.
The tune we know as ‘Happy Birthday to You’ started life as a children’s song called Good Morning to All, published in 1893 and usually attributed to the American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill. The birthday words came later, and somehow this small, slightly awkward tune became one of the most recognisable songs in the world. It also became, for decades, a surprisingly serious copyright business, which is why films and TV shows often used to avoid it or replace it with some fake birthday song that fooled absolutely no one.
And then I remembered a video of the Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer talking about how much he dislikes it. Honestly, he has a point. The stress falls oddly on the word ‘to’, as in ‘Happy birthday TO you’, which is not really how anyone would say it. Then, just when a room full of normal people is trying to survive, the tune jumps up an octave, which is exactly the kind of thing that separates the confident from the silent mouthers.
So Fischer offers an alternative birthday song. And I have to say, I’m kind of with him.
Still, whether we like the birthday song or not, composers have been marking birthdays for centuries, and often in much more interesting ways than just sticking candles in a cake. Some birthday pieces are acts of love. Some are acts of career management. Some are private family gifts that accidentally became public property. And some are composers taking the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ and doing deeply composer-ish things to it.
So, since it was my birthday, and since I will take any excuse to build a playlist, this week is a birthday edition.
Greeting Prelude - Igor Stravinsky
This is a fun place to start, because it is basically Happy Birthday after Stravinsky has got his hands on it, which means it is familiar, but only just. The whole thing is under a minute, but it has a surprisingly good backstory.
In 1950, Stravinsky was conducting a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Symphony at the Aspen Festival. He gave the downbeat, expecting one thing, and instead the orchestra played Happy Birthday. The joke was that one of the players had just become a father, but Stravinsky, who did not know the song, had absolutely no idea what was going on. You can imagine the room. The musicians delighted with themselves, Stravinsky visibly confused, and then the slow diplomatic process of explaining that no, maestro, this was not an attempted coup, just a birthday-adjacent American ritual.
He clearly remembered it, because a few years later, when Charles Munch asked him to write a short orchestral piece for the 80th birthday of Pierre Monteux, the former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Stravinsky came back to that tune. The result is Greeting Prelude, and it does exactly what you would hope Stravinsky would do with Happy Birthday. The tune is there, but it keeps slipping sideways. It has a wink, a sharp edge, and that slightly wonky feeling Stravinsky does so well, where something simple is suddenly walking around in very expensive, angular shoes.
It is also a very grand opening for a birthday playlist, considering it lasts less than a minute. But I like that. It arrives, makes its point, causes mild confusion, and leaves.
There is one more very funny detail. Stravinsky apparently thought Happy Birthday was free to use, which, at the time, it very much was not. For years, the song was still treated as copyrighted, so some of the royalties from Greeting Prelude had to go to the rights holders. Imagine being Stravinsky and discovering that even your tiny birthday joke comes with admin.
Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne - G. F. Handel
If Stravinsky gives us the birthday song as a musical prank, Handel gives us the birthday piece as a career move.
In 1713, Handel wrote his Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, and honestly, if you are trying to stay on the good side of a monarch, composing something glorious for their birthday is not the worst idea. A cantata, by the way, is a piece for voices and instruments, usually made up of several sections: solos, duets, choruses, and orchestral passages. It is not quite an opera, because no one is acting out a plot on stage, but it still has drama, contrast and plenty of vocal showing off.
Handel was born in Germany, but London became the place where he really made his name. He brought with him a very fashionable Italian style, full of vocal brilliance and theatrical flair, and somehow managed to make it feel completely at home in Britain. This ode is part of that world: ceremonial, polished, and designed to impress.
The funny thing is that Queen Anne may never even have heard it. She was apparently not a great music lover, and there is no clear evidence that the piece was performed for her birthday. But whether she heard it or not, later that year she granted Handel an annual pension of £200, which was a very serious amount of money. Not bad for a birthday present that may or may not have reached the birthday girl.
The famous opening, Eternal Source of Light Divine, is one of those Handel moments where everything seems to glow from the inside. It begins with a solo voice and trumpet, and the whole thing feels suspended in the air. It is ceremonial, yes, but not heavy. It has that extraordinary Handel ability to sound grand and intimate at the same time, which is probably why it still turns up at major public occasions, including the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in 2018.
The whole ode is only about 20 minutes, which feels like exactly the right length for keeping royal attention. There are solo numbers, duets, choruses, and enough Handel sparkle to make it feel like a proper occasion. If Handel is your bag, it is a very good Saturday morning listen.
Dolly Suite - Gabriel Fauré
This one is a birthday present too, though in slightly more complicated circumstances.
Fauré’s Dolly Suite is a set of 6 short piano duets written or revised between 1893 and 1896 for Hélène Bardac, known as Dolly. She was the daughter of Emma Bardac, with whom Fauré had a long affair, so yes, this is technically birthday music for the child of his mistress.
The pieces were written for piano duet, which means 2 people playing at the same piano. There is something very domestic about that, and also slightly romantic, in the old-fashioned drawing-room sense. You can picture the 2 players sitting side by side, elbows nearly bumping, making music that is intimate rather than showy.
The opening piece is the famous Berceuse, which means lullaby in French. It had originally been written earlier for another child, but Fauré later folded it into the Dolly Suite, where it became associated with Dolly’s first birthday. And it really does feel like a lullaby. Not in a sugary way, but in that gently rocking, half-awake way.
Fauré was not always keen on titles, and often preferred to let the music speak for itself, but publishers do like people to know what they are buying. A title like Berceuse gives listeners a little doorway into the piece, and in this case it helps.
I’ve chosen the recording by Katia and Marielle Labèque, the French piano sisters who have spent decades performing together. There is something perfect about that for this piece: family, closeness, shared rhythm, 4 hands at one piano. They are famously glamorous, hugely successful, and apparently still live together in a palace in Rome. Can only imagine the birthdays there.
Siegfried Idyll - Richard Wagner
In 1870, Wagner wanted to surprise his wife Cosima for her birthday. Cosima’s birthday was technically 24 December, but she celebrated it on Christmas Day, so on the morning of 25 December, Wagner arranged for a small group of musicians to gather on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen, near Lucerne. Cosima woke up to the sound of the piece being played in the house.
I mean, the man had his faults. Many, many faults. But as birthday gestures go, this is annoyingly good.
The piece was originally written for a small chamber ensemble, not the huge Wagnerian forces we might expect. And that is part of what makes it so touching. This is not Wagner trying to crush you with brass and destiny. It is Wagner in private mode. The music is warm, tender and unusually gentle, with none of the apocalyptic shouting people sometimes associate with him. It feels like a domestic scene enlarged just enough to become music.
Of course, because it is Wagner, even the private birthday present could not stay simple. The piece was connected to family life, to the birth of their son Siegfried, and to musical ideas that would later feed into Wagner’s huge operatic world. He originally intended it to remain private, but later, when money became a problem, he sold the score and expanded the orchestration to make it more suitable for public performance. Not the most romantic ending, perhaps, but also very Wagner.
Still, none of that really damages the piece. However it ended up in the world, it began as the sound of someone waking up to music written for them. And if you strip away the mythology, the debts, the ego and the Wagnerness of it all, that is still quite beautiful.
Happy Birthday Variations - John Williams
And finally, back to the birthday song itself.
John Williams’ Happy Birthday Variations does something very simple and very effective: it takes the tune everyone knows and passes it around the orchestra. If you know Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, it has a similar spirit. The point is not just ‘here is the melody’, but ‘here is what happens when different instruments get to wear it for a bit’.
The piece was written for a 1995 Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Tanglewood celebrating the birthdays of Seiji Ozawa, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Leon Fleisher. That is quite a birthday table: a conductor, a cellist, a violinist and a pianist, and not exactly minor names. If you are going to arrange Happy Birthday for someone, you may as well do it for that lot.
It is a brilliant piece for hearing the orchestra as a set of characters. The tune moves from section to section, changing colour each time. What sounds bright and cheeky in one instrument can suddenly become grand, silky, pompous or ridiculous in another. It is also a great one for children, because you can actually hear the instruments stepping forward one by one.
So there we have it, a birthday playlist that starts with a tune everyone knows and ends up somewhere far more interesting.
I like that these pieces were written for such different reasons, not a bad reminder that a birthday doesn’t have to be a huge event to leave a little mark.
Have a good weekend! x
It was my birthday on Sunday (7th) and I very much enjoyed this well timed collection, especially Fischer’s amusing analysis. Ta muchly.
✨🎉🎂👏🏽🤗✨Another tour aroung the sun begins Happiest Birthday ✨🙏🏽✨🌺