Drinking song

• 1. Introduction

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  Drinking songs are among the oldest forms of communal music on earth. They exist in almost every culture that ferments grain or fruit, and they answer a simple human need: to mark the moment when strangers become friends, or friends become something closer.

  What makes a drinking song? At its core, it is any song sung before or during the act of drinking alcohol. Most fall into the category of folk songs or commercium songs, those semi-formal pieces that travel through generations by word of mouth, shifting in lyrics and melody from region to region and person to person. That mutability is part of their power.

  The questions worth sitting with are these: why do certain cultures develop elaborate traditions around sung drinking, and what happens when a composer of serious art music decides the drinking song is worth his attention? Those answers lie scattered across Germany, Sweden, Spain, France, and the notebooks of Franz Schubert.

• 2. A Geography of Celebration

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  Germany has a single, direct word for the tradition: Trinklieder. The term simply means drinking songs, and the Germans have treated the genre with the same industrious seriousness they bring to most things.

  Sweden takes the form further, splitting it into two named categories. Dryckesvisor and snapsvisor are not interchangeable. They attach themselves to the calendar: Christmas drinking songs, Midsummer drinking songs, songs for other celebrations across the year. One of the most recognizable examples is "Helan går", a piece so embedded in Swedish festive life that its name alone conjures the clink of a small glass.

  Spain offers a stranger case. "Asturias, patria querida" is officially the anthem of Asturias, yet it is commonly understood to be a drinking song. Anthem and drinking song occupy the same melody, and no one seems troubled by the overlap.

  France, characteristically, gave the form several names. The chanson pour boire and the air à boire are historical categories of drinking song, each with its own tonal expectations. Where the Swedish song ties to a holiday and the German to a single collective noun, the French variants suggest something more refined, more conscious of itself as a genre with rules.

• 3. The English Repertoire

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  "99 Bottles of Beer" is probably the most widely recognized English drinking song, at least in terms of how many people have suffered through it on long car rides. But the English-language tradition runs considerably deeper and stranger than that single counting exercise.

  "Drunken Sailor" and "Whiskey in the Jar" both carry the salt of maritime and Irish folk traditions. "Barrett's Privateers" comes out of a different kind of seafaring story. "The Barley Mow" is one of the older pieces in the repertoire, its subject being barley itself, the grain at the root of the whole enterprise.

  Some titles in the English list are notably specific to particular communities. "Engineers' Drinking Song" and "California Drinking Song" both suggest sub-traditions, songs that belong to a profession or a place rather than to the general public. "The Wild Rover" and "Seven Drunken Nights" lean into narrative, giving listeners a character to follow through verses.

  "Friends in Low Places" is a more recent arrival, a country song by commercial origins that migrated into the drinking song canon through sheer frequency of being sung in bars. That migration says something about how the tradition keeps refreshing itself.

• 4. Schubert's Trinklieder

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  Franz Schubert wrote his first drinking-song lieder in 1813. He was sixteen years old. The piece, catalogued as D 75, was a cantata called "Trinklied" with the opening line "Freunde, sammelt euch im Kreise", written for bass, men's choir, and piano.

  What followed across the next thirteen years was a sustained engagement with the form. Schubert returned to Trinklied settings repeatedly, writing works for different vocal combinations: tenors and basses in various arrangements, solo voice with piano, double unison choir. In 1815 alone he produced at least five separate drinking-song pieces, ranging from the chorus "Trinklied vor der Schlacht" with its opening line "Schlacht, du brichst an!" to the quartet "Trinklied" opening with "Auf! Jeder sei nun froh und sorgenfrei!"

  The 1816 output included a trio catalogued as D 426, which has since been lost, and another trio catalogued as D 427, "Trinklied im Mai", which survives. The 1825 piece D 847 carried an unusually precise subtitle: "Trinklied aus dem 16. Jahrhundert", meaning "Drinking Song from the 16th Century". Its text, opening with "Edit Nonna, edit Clerus", placed Schubert in dialogue with a much older tradition.

  His final contribution to the form, D 888 from 1826, opened with the line "Bacchus, feister Fürst des Weins" and was set for voice and piano. Across more than a decade, Schubert had treated the drinking song not as a diversion from serious composition but as a form worth returning to at different stages of his development.

• 5. Libiamo and the Operatic Stage

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  Giuseppe Verdi placed a drinking song at the center of one of opera's most celebrated scenes. "Libiamo ne' lieti calici", from La Traviata, transforms the private tradition of the sung toast into something theatrical and public.

  The title translates roughly as "Let us drink from the joyful cups". Verdi set the piece as a duet within a party scene, which meant the audience watches characters perform the same social ritual that real people perform outside the theater. The operatic drinking song becomes a mirror held up to the tradition it depicts.

  That placement of a drinking song inside a grand opera shows how far the form traveled from its folk origins. The same impulse that produced "Helan går" for a Swedish Midsummer table found its way into a staged drama by one of the nineteenth century's most serious composers.

• 6. Folk Roots and Constant Change

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  Most drinking songs are folk songs, which means they belong to no one person and to everyone at once. The version sung in one town may differ substantially from the version sung fifty miles away, in both words and tune.

  That variability is not a flaw in the tradition. It is the tradition. A drinking song that travels and changes is a drinking song that is alive. One that stays fixed is a drinking song that has become a museum piece.

  The commercium song sits at the edge of that folk tradition. Commercium songs have a more formal character, associated with student and guild gatherings, but they share the folk song's tendency to spread and adapt. Pieces like "Ein Heller und ein Batzen" and "Eisgekühlter Bommerlunder" in the German tradition, or "Bevilo tutto" in Italian, carry that combination of fixed title and flexible performance.

  The Belarusian "Drobna drabnitsa" makes the same point on a different linguistic ground: the drinking song is not a European or even a Western phenomenon. It is a form that appears wherever people gather around fermented drink and feel the need to mark the gathering with sound.