"Hearts and Flowers" is a song composed by Theodore Moses-Tobani (with words by Mary D. Brine) and published in 1893.
The famous melody is taken from the introductory 2/4 section of "Wintermärchen" Waltzes Op.366 (1891) by the Hungarian composer Alphons Czibulka.
The song as a vocal number was soon forgotten but the piece it was founded upon, re-arranged as a short instrumental, gained popularity in its own right under the same title "Hearts and Flowers" and it is in this form that it remains well known to this day.
The 2/4 melody Czibulka's "Wintermärchen" Waltzes Op.366 (1891) was also re-arranged into 3/4 time to form the first waltz in the instrumental-only "Hearts and Flowers" Waltzes by Moses-Tobani though this is now never heard.
Today the piece "Hearts and Flowers" has a connection in popular culture with having been associated with silent film accompaniment music. The connection is entirely a latter-day one however as silent film scores were typically assembled from music that specifically was unfamiliar to the audience so as to not distract attention from the on-screen action.
Nevertheless, the instrumental violin version has in the collective popular imagination come to symbolize all that is melodramatic, sentimental or mock-tragic. Indeed, the humming of the tune is often combined with the miming of violin-playing to indicate mock-sympathy at someone's misfortunes.
The term 'hearts-and-flowers' has entered the English language with the sense "extreme sentimentality, cloying sweetness".
Famous quotes containing the words hearts and/or flowers:
“We shall exchange our material thinking for something quite different, and we shall all be kin. We shall all be enfranchised, prohibition will prevail, many wrongs will be righted, vampires and grafters and slackers will be relegated to a class by themselves, stiff necks will limber up, hearts of stone will be changed to hearts of flesh, and little by little we shall begin to understand each other.”
—General Federation Of Women’s Clubs (GFWC)
“Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)