Tea at Trianon: "Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

"Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

The story behind the song. From Smithsonian:

This past Sunday, on a stage in the foyer of the National Museum of American History, three theatrical performers sang a version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" I had never heard before—the original version. " Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past," they crooned . "Faithful friends who are dear to us / Will be near to us no more."

Dark, right? Off-putting, for sure. Had I not heard the singers preface their performance by saying they were going to sing the more melancholy, original lyrics, I would have thought them perverse for tampering with the coveted carol, as passing museum-goers might have. But the rest of the audience and I, in the know, gasped simultaneously at the first departure from the more familiar lyrics and then broke into nervous laughter at the rest.

So the story goes, Judy Garland, who sang the song in the 1944-film Meet Me in St. Louis, found the original lyrics too depressing for wartime. Hugh Martin, the songwriter, somewhat begrudgingly revised the song to have a more optimistic bent. Among other tweaks, " It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past" became " Let your heart by light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight." And, in 1957, at Frank Sinatra’s request, Martin changed the penultimate line, " Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow," to " Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." (The name of Sinatra’s album, with his version of the song, was A Jolly Christmas, after all.) (Read more.)