The Loveliest Night of the Year

When I woke up on Christmas day in 1951 or 52, at the bottom of my bed sat a pink music box. I was only seven or eight at the time but I’d already learned from friends that if I turned the brass bar tucked underneath, opened the lid, a dancer would pop up circling to a waltz that was delightful, even if it sounded slightly tinny.  In chilly postwar Britain where rationing was only just ending and recorded music came from the bakelite radio or a wind up 78 rpm gramophone, this was magic.

I’ve been thinking about that music box again recently and about the story of that waltz.  It’s not a Christmas story but a story appropriate to Christmas, I think. It’s a story of achievement, of boundary crossing, and of far flung links between people and places. It echoes the pleasure I get at this time of the year when messages, emails, and even the odd letters and Christmas cards roll in from friends, some whom I have known since music box days, others from the various stages of my life in many different parts of the world, and reading them and remembering helps tie an itinerant life together.

I can date when I was given the music box because in 1951 this waltz, accompanied by lyrics composed the year before by the American songwriter Paul Francis Webster –“When you are in love/It’s the loveliest night of the year/Stars twinkle above/And you almost can touch them from here. . .”–was number 3 in the charts. A rash of recordings appeared, most notably the Italian-American tenor, Mario Lanza‘s 1950 version and the British “force’s sweetheart” Vera Lynn’s  in 1954.

Long before the waltz was tagged with the name “the loveliest night of the year”  and long after its 1950s popularity, it had a long and wide history.

Wurlitzer’s fairground organs ground it out at fairgrounds and circuses across  the United States.  When television introduced cartoons and later Sesame Street to family living rooms, there was the waltz.

Music publishers from formal Boston to exuberant Berlin put out sheet music.

Orchestras and military bands regularly made recordings, such as this one in 1904 by the Vienna Orchestra and this much later one by the Central Military Band of the Russian Ministry of Defence.

When New Orleans hosted the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial in 1884-85, Mexico sent the Band of the Eight Regiment of the Mexican Cavalry who delighted crowds with snappy renditions of this waltz and other favorites

New Orleans Public Library

Thus the waltz entered the jazz of New Orleans and from there made its way into Tejano music as well as American country music. Chet Atkins and Willie Nelson are just two of the many who have recorded it.

Over the years, the waltz has been attributed to different musicians. Thanks to Mario Lanza, In 1960, Connie Francis could include in a recording of “More Italian Favorites.” Many assumed it was written by Johan Strauss. Some have attributed to Willie Nelson.

Not so. The waltz was composed by a young Mexican prodigy, Juventino Rosas who published it as Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves) in 1888. He came from the small town of Santa Cruz in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico. When I lived in the capital of the state, I drove the forty or so miles there every year to see the magnificent fields of wild cosmos that stretched above the town, the same shade of pink as that music box at the bottom of my bed.

By José María Noriega.

In 1875, when Juventino was seven years old, he with his fiddle, his two brothers and his father, who had become a musician in a military band, walked the four hundred kilometers to Mexico City to seek their fortune as street musicians. Someone, somehow spotted Juventino’s talent and he was enrolled in the Music Conservatory.  In the eight years before his death from fever on a tour in Cuba in 1894, he had moved from playing in the streets to playing in society ballrooms and for the President of the country, and composed a hundred concert pieces and one opera.

Now Juventino’s home town has been renamed Juventino Rosas de Santa Cruz.  When this Otomi teenager composed one of the world’s most-loved waltzes did he, I wonder, think back to the cosmos that danced like the waves of the sea on the hills above his hometown?

Happiness to all those who celebrate Christmas, peace and enjoyment to those who do not, and comfort to those who for one reason or another are mourning.

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