(Fr.).
A Swiss mountain melody sung or played on an alphorn by herdsmen in the Alps to summon their cows. The term is interchangeable with the German Kuhreigen or Kuhreihen. About 50 melodies survive, characterized by their improvisatory nature and reiterated short phrases with changes of tempo and accent. Theodor Zwinger quoted an example in his chapter ‘De pothopatridalgia’ on the effects of nostalgia (Fasciculus dissertationum medicarum, Basle, 1710); another was reproduced in J.-J. Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768/R; Eng. trans., 1771), with the comment that the ranz des vaches ‘was so generally beloved among the Swiss [mercenaries], that it was forbidden to be play’d in their troops under pain of death, because it made them burst into tears, desert or die, whoever heard it; so great a desire did it excite in them of returning to their country’. Surviving texts for the melodies are rare; Viotti is reported to have heard one performed in Switzerland by a woman singing in unison with an alphorn (see the texted Gruyère ranz in A.H. King: ‘Mountains, Music and Musicians’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 395–419). An early printed example of the famous Appenzell ranz melody occurs in Rhau’s first book of Bicinia gallica, latina, germanica (RISM 15456), where it begins with the words ‘Lobet, o lobet’ (from loba: ‘cow’; hence Lobetanz); Meyerbeer used the same melody in his opera Dinorah (1859), and it also appears in the overtures to Grétry’s and Rossini’s operas Guillaume Tell (1791 and 1829). The lilting shepherd’s piping that opens the last movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808) is directly modelled on the Rigi ranz; other more stylized imitations of the ranz des vaches occur in the ‘Scène aux champs’ in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830), Schumann’s Manfred (1848–9), Liszt’s Album d’un voyageur (1835–6) and at the beginning of the third act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865).
See also Pastoral, §6.