Mykola Leontovych’s “Shchedryk” has become a recognized classic, performed by everyone from orchestras to jazz and rock bands. Notable arrangements by the band Pentatonix or the Spanish tenor Placido Domingo are worth mentioning.
But how did a purely Ukrainian melody become an international phenomenon? The English-language version of “Shchedryk”, sung worldwide at Christmas today, was published in 1936. The author of the English-language text was an American conductor of Ukrainian descent, Peter Wilhousky.
“Since the young people would not sing in Ukrainian,” Wilhousky wrote in a letter to Ukrainian musicologist Roman Savytskyi, “I had to write an English text. I removed the Ukrainian word for shchedryk (bird) and instead focused on the cheerful chiming of the bells that I heard in the music.”
After the radio premiere, Peter Wilhousky recalled that music teachers from all over the United States inundated him with requests for sheet music. So, in November 1936, he published “Shchedryk” at the Carl Fischer Music Publishing House in New York, renaming the song “Carol of the Bells”.
However, if in the 1920s “Shchedryk” gained worldwide fame as a Ukrainian song, with its transformation into “Carol of the Bells”, the work is no longer associated with Ukraine. Although Peter Wilhousky mentioned in his notes that it was a Ukrainian carol, the song became an American one for the world. And in professional music circles, it was often still considered a “Russian folk song.” After all, virtually everything that came from the USSR was Russian to a Westerner.
For example, a popular American choir under the direction of Robert Shaw in its Christmas Hymns and Carols (1946) provided a remarkable annotation for “Carol of the Bells”: “A typical Russian folk carol by Leontovych, a composer about whom we have been unable to find any information.” This is not surprising. It was challenging to discover information about the author of America’s most popular Christmas hit not only across the pond but also in his homeland due to Soviet repression.
Read more about the song that became a symbol of Christmas for the whole world in the long read “Shchedryk”: A Famous Song with an Unknown Story on our website: https://www.ukrainer.net/en-shchedryk-carol-of-the-bells-history/
Voice of Ukraine 