Twinkle, Twinkle: Mozart, the Mad Hatter, and Edison's Talking Doll

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is one of those songs you seem to know before anyone teaches it to you.

But Mozart did not write it.

The melody first appears in eighteenth-century France, where one early set of words is about a young woman telling her mother about a shepherd who has talked his way into her arms. Mozart later wrote twelve piano variations on the tune. Jane Taylor's poem The Star arrived only in 1806, and the words and melody were joined later still.

This episode follows six remarkably durable notes through Mozart, the Alphabet Song, Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, Saint-Saëns, Edison's talking doll, Dohnányi, Steeleye Span, and Dead Space.

Along the way, the tune keeps changing jobs without really changing itself: love song, piano exercise, nursery rhyme, teaching tool, musical joke, technological experiment, and horror soundtrack.

Apparently, if a melody is simple enough for a child to remember, it is also difficult for culture to get rid of.