Humpty Dumpty doesn’t always stick to the script these days. Sometimes he sits on a wall, sometimes he gets out of bed and rubs his bald head. To a parent reciting a nursery rhyme to a child, it may not make a bit of difference exactly how Humpty goes about his day, or what his fate is. Changing the details of a nursery rhyme may not seem important on the surface, but it does undermine the basic function of the rhyme as a morality tale. Robin Hendrix is a purist when it comes to nursery rhymes. She would never for a second think about upsetting their morals by altering their verses, and when (as a trained soprano) she sang them years ago to her children, she did so in the way they were meant to sound in their heyday of the 1870s. Now with her two children grown and her pianist husband Michel Prezman accompanying her, Hendrix has transferred the serene musical sounds of 19th-century childhood to CD, in the critically praised Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. “Nursery Rhymes” is no measly 10-track Victorian version of a “Billboard Top Hits” compilation. The 46 rhymes included here, ranging in length from 20 seconds to five minutes, were set to music by J.W. Elliott, a noted composer of the period. Elliott produced a variety of musical works, including anthems, compositions for instruments such as the harmonium, and a pair of operettas. (While living in London, he assisted Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, on a church hymn editing project). Many of the rhymes are unmistakably familiar: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “Little Bo-Peep”, “Baa, Baa Black Sheep”, “Simple Simon”, “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, and the aforementioned accident-waiting-to-happen tale of “Humpty Dumpty”. Hearing such familiar rhymes touched by Elliott’s delicate compositions and Hendrix’s elegant operatic lilt is no less a revelation than the listener’s discovery of the more obscure but equally wonderful “Six Little Snails”, “The King of France”, and “My Lady Wind”. Each rhyme has a fineness and resonance that makes it seem as if it were happening 130 years ago — a quality enhanced by the fact that the disc was recorded inside Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, a setting that Hendrix says was chosen not only for its acoustics, but also for its similarity to the kind of performance environment that would have been used in Elliott’s day. A singer since childhood, Hendrix earned a degree in Voice Performance from Florida State University. Although she and her husband recently moved to New Jersey after two years of living in Manhattan, the pair’s affection for the city, which they say they expect to come back to some day, is solidified by an attachment to something no musician would ever leave behind for good — a grand piano, which Hendrix says “still lives there” in a penthouse on Second Avenue and 59th Street. Hendrix says her repertoire consists of what are known as “art songs” (compositions by composers such as Brahms and Schumann, performed in multiple languages) and her specialty, English and American poetry set to epic music. While studying in France with an accompanist, she says she “crashed into this Frenchman” — a fellow concert artist who would become her future husband. The mutual dislike between Hendrix and Prezman thawed when Hendrix performed a song in a restaurant where the pair was dining with acquaintances. “He was completely changed,” Hendrix says of the evening. “We bonded over song.” As a mom with a voice, Hendrix played the piano and sang nursery rhymes to her two children, Leah and Stephen, using the arrangements from Elliott’s 1870 book, of which she owns several versions. (A few of the book’s original wood-engraved illustrations, by the renowned Dalziel Brothers, have been included in the disc’s eight-panel foldout cover). The activity of singing to her kids, mingled with the sound of children laughing and playing that reached the couple’s apartment window from the NYU children’s park on Mercer Street, gave birth to a desire, Hendrix says, to “bring the songs to the children I heard outside my window.” The ensuing CD became the couple’s first commercial recording. Hendrix refers, somewhat paradoxically, to her faithful rendition of Elliott’s compositions as an “alternative” to the improvisational versions that have evolved over the years. “We’re seeing the rhymes being changed today, and I just wanted to make sure that people could hear them again the way they were originally done,” she says about keeping the verses, morals, and arrangements in tact. Although some rhymes served as veiled political commentaries about royalty and Parliament, Hendrix says that many verses turned the spotlight on issues of personal morality. “The poems that were recited in that period were allegories about how to live your life, and about simple things like how to treat animals, and about basic behavior, like not spitting or swearing,” she points out. “The last verse of ‘The Spider and the Fly’ is a wonderful image — The spider’s name is pleasure/Must not stand outside pleasure’s door — and warns that if you hang around a place long enough, you’ll be sorry. ‘My Lady Wind’ is about gossip, something we all experience.” Hendrix believes that children haven’t changed much over time, at least in regard to their general interests. “Their surroundings change, but children still like pussycats and dogs as much as they do now,” she says. “What disconnects children of today from the children of yesterday is that, back in 1870, children were quite protected from adult life. They were separated from adulthood — the music for adults then wouldn’t have been the same music that children were exposed to. Back then, Elliott’s book would have been on every nursery shelf in England. It’s what every educated child would do — read and know music.” For more information, go to www.nursery-songs.com.
