{"id":37119,"date":"2023-12-26T17:49:04","date_gmt":"2023-12-26T16:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a63b71ef-9d2a-48a8-9643-3546687fa024"},"modified":"2023-12-26T18:39:57","modified_gmt":"2023-12-26T17:39:57","slug":"best-lullabies-8-of-the-most-famous","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/best-lullabies-8-of-the-most-famous\/","title":{"rendered":"Best lullabies: 8 of the most famous"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Hannah Nepilova\n <\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 26 December 2023 at 16:49 PM<\/p>

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There are few songs more deeply ingrained in us than lullabies. They take us back to our earliest memories of childhood. For many new parents they prompt an even more Pavlovian response. But which are the most famous lullabies of all? Here are our eight choices.<\/p>

Favourite lullabies<\/h2>

Johannes Brahms: Wiegenlied, Op 49 No 4<\/h3>

You’d be hard-pressed to avoid this song even if you wanted to. It has long been a fixture of the baby care product market, emanating from music boxes, crib mobiles and stuffed toys all over the world. For me, it is synonymous with the long nights of early parenthood – and I bet I’m not alone. But while we may all know and either love or hate this song, fewer of us know how it came to be composed. <\/p>

The story starts with a young woman named Bertha Porubsky, whom Johannes Brahms<\/strong><\/a> met in Hamburg, where she sang in a women\u2019s chorus that he conducted. By all accounts, the composer was smitten Porubsky and the pair went on to have a long correspondence.\u00a0<\/p>

She ended up marrying someone else: the successful business man Artur Faber. Still, Brahms stayed in touch, and on the birth of Bertha\u2019s second son in 1868, wrote her this piece for solo voice and piano, based on a melody that Bertha used to sing to him. <\/p>

With it, he enclosed a letter: “Frau Bertha will immediately see that I composed the cradle song yesterday specifically for your little one; she will also find it quite appropriate, as do I, that while she sings Hans to sleep, her husband sings to her and murmurs a love song.’ But as the song spread around the world in different arrangements, Brahms, upset at the thought of having his work mangled, apparently complained to his publisher: ‘Why not make a new edition in a minor key for naughty or sick children? That would be still another way to move copies.’<\/p>