O Tannenbaum (O Christmas Tree)

This lecture was given by Andrew Page at the O Tannenbaum Bicentenary event, hosted by Balmer Street Methodist Church, St Helens, on 16th December 2024.

We are here this evening to mark the bicentenary of O Tannenbaum – a song most of us in the English-speaking world know as O Christmas Tree.

The first thing to say about O Tannenbaum is that it is not about a Christmas tree. It is not a Christmas song. And it is certainly not a carol.

A Tannenbaum is, more correctly translated, a fir tree. And the wonderful German lyrics we’ve heard already this evening do not refer to Christmas at all – only winter. The fir tree in the song is not decorated according to the German Christmas traditions – it is, simply, a fir tree and a symbol of faithfulness.

How then, did O Tannenbaum come to be associated with Christmas? The fact is the popularity of the song coincided with the development of Christmas tree customs in Germany and beyond. There is evidence for Christmas traditions evergreen trees as early as 1510, when a group of merchants called the Brotherhood of Blackheads set fire to such a tree in remembrance of Jesus, the Light of the World. Some argue that Martin Luther began the custom of decorating trees in the Protestant tradition, and it is claimed he came up with the idea while walking through a pine forest in 1536. If so, the custom didn’t really take hold until the 1550s, when glass baubles and crafted decorations appear.

Despite this clear evidence, it wasn’t until the early to mid 19th century that bringing fir trees indoors and decorating them – often with candles – became widely popular. To say there was a Christmas tree craze in Germany would be something of an understatement – Christmas tree mania took hold! The tradition became not only firmly established but became a centrepoint of Christmas festivities.

In the 1790s, George III’s German wife, Charlotte, decorated trees for Christmas. But the notion really took off in Britain in 1848 when Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were pictured in a fashionable London newspaper beside a decorated Christmas tree. And so the boom in popularity of decorating trees in Germany coincided with British people eagerly adopting this tradition. After years of Christmas not being widely observed in America due to the dislike of the holiday among Puritans, by the 1820s attitudes towards Christmas were shifting. German settlers appear to have brought Christmas trees to America in the 1830s, but it took until 1850 before these captured the imagination of the public. An influential magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, used the picture of the British Royal family – albeit adapting to make them look more American, an early example of airbrushing perhaps – and helped popularise the tradition.

It is against this backdrop that O Tannenbaum, too, became well-known and popularised. More by accident than design, it came to represent the Christmas tree and the lyrics were interpreted as having particular significance in relation to Christmas. And so, when translated into languages other than German, it is perhaps not too surprising that these misunderstandings of the song’s meanings found their way into the translations.

So, what was the intention of O Tannenbaum’s author? Who was he? What were his inspirations? And where did the tune come from?

Ernst Anschütz was a Leipzig organist who was also a German teacher, a poet and a composer. In 1824 he wrote the modern lyrics that became so widely known. However, he was drawing from a much older folk song, also called O Tannenbaum. The exact words to the original Silesian folk song have been lost, but we know that they were re-written in 1915 by Melchior Franck. His lyrics are:

“Ach Tannebaum Ach Tannebaum
du bist ein edler Zweig!
Du grünest uns den Winter,
die lieben Sommerzeit.”

This can be roughly translated as: "Oh pine tree, oh pine tree, you're a noble twig! You greet us in the winter, the dear summer time."

In 1819 these lyrics too had been revisited by a collector of German folk music, August Zarnack. He wrote a tragic love song inspired by the ancient words, contrasting the faithful fir tree with a faithless lover. Anschütz would have been aware of these various versions and adaptations when, in 1824, he decided to bring them together in a modern reinterpretation.

It is difficult to know why, exactly, Anschütz chose to do this. It may simply be because he had an interest in folk music. It may be that he didn’t like Zarnack’s reimagination of O Tannenbaum as a love song, although it is curious that he retained the reference to “true” (faithful) if that was the case. What is very clear is that he wasn’t writing for an international audience obsessed with Christmas trees.

Anschütz’s lyrics instead speak in praise of the evergreen fir tree, which is the cause of great delight and inspires hope, perseverance, courage and strength. A great message for us at Christmastime, naturally, but the message is – like the tree itself – evergreen.

Anschütz’s words are two hundred years old, but the inspiration behind them is clearly much older. But what of the tune, which is known to all of us and has also been famously used as the Labour Party anthem, The Red Flag?

Anschütz, despite his evident musical abilities, opted not to compose a new tune for his creation. The melody with which we are all familiar is an old folk tune, attested in the 16th century. This tune was most closely associated with the song Es lebe hoch der Zimmermannsgeselle ("Long Live the Carpenter’s Apprentice”).

Strangely, O Tannenbaum wasn’t as popular in Germany during the 19th century as its various English versions were in Britain and the US. Its popularity in its home nation has risen since the 1940s, although it doesn’t attract quite the same levels of cultural and academic interest as Stille Nacht. Perhaps its place in popular culture was partly due to the melody being used in a satirical song about the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who saw out his final days in exile after fleeing from Germany in 1918. At the time, German carollers snag words to the famous tune that could be translated as, "O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, the Kaiser's packing it all in." There were other political versions of the song circulating during World War I, with "O Hindenburg, o Hindenburg, how beautiful are your victories" being sung after the German victory at the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes.

Many years prior to this, in 1861, Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War put their own words to the tune. Their song – “Maryland, My Maryland” – contained lyrics describing Abraham Lincoln as “The despot”, “the tyrant” and worse. It contains the Latin phrase Sic simper tyrannis (“this always to tyrants”) which John Wilkes Booth shouted when he assassinated Lincoln in 1863. Despite this, it was the official state song of Maryland until as recently as 2021.

Fortunately, the wonderful tune remains most associated with the Tannenbaum – the tree that we continue to love and which remains, all these years later, a key component of Christmas celebrations as well as an enduring symbol of perseverance.

Lyrics