Backe, backe Kuchen

Backe backe, cake is a popular German -language children's song. The origin is suspected in Saxony and Thuringia before the year 1840. There are several variants that differ in the text and the number of verses. The rhyme text is sung to a simple, popular and essentially pentatonic melody.

Text and melody

Bake, bake cakes, The baker has created. If you want good cake baking, the must have stuff, Eggs and lard, Sugar and salt, Milk and flour, Saffron makes the cake gehl! Push, push in'n oven 'no.

The melody structures the musical text in the sense of Reprisenbarform. The framing lines ( studs) are conventional four-bar periods in which only the melodic variation in the postscript of the recapitulation (ie in the last two cycles ) enlivens the otherwise rather monotonous course. Interestingly, however, the symmetry of these run counter oddness of the bars of the Abgesang is ( ie the " middle part "). This irregularity is common in folk songs, as soon as " litany -like " texts primarily enumerative content set to music. Famous songs that use this effect significantly stronger than that with its three-bar swansong relatively simple bake cakes! Include The farmer sends the Jockel, or the English Christmas carol The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Text and variants

The text probably goes back to a common custom, according to which the bakers after baking of the bread with a horn " called " to signal the women of the neighborhood, that the residual heat of the oven could now be used to bake their cakes. Even where the bread was baked on certain days in the common village oven, there was a signal when the bread taken out and the residual heat of the oven could be used for baking cakes.

The original form of the text with the rhyming enumerating the ingredients can already be found in 1450 in " Maister Hannsen the host mountain cooking cookbook " where the preparation of Muses is notified.

It is striking that the text refers to the yellow coloring effect of saffron. None of the other six mentioned ingredients provides an obvious rhyme word for the German standard "yellow". Therefore, the traditional lyric writes " gehl " (also known as "gel " ) to ensure a roughly plausible rhyme to " flour ". There are Upper German dialects, such as the Northeast Bairische which soften the final- b -w, so it'll eventually no longer heard or was no longer spoken. Furthermore, " geel " the Low German and Dutch word for " yellow".

The last line is only in some variants added, as well as the text as " purely sliding it in the oven ' " is also transferred into High German sung.