Mozart wished upon a star, and it sounds just like that ‘Twinkle’ song

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how we wonder who wrote you.

That line of course is a variation on the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” as it broaches the subject of the work’s authorship. Most sources trace the song to the 18th-century French melody Ah! vous dirai-je, maman (“Oh! Shall I Tell You, Mama”), which has inspired any number of different tunes, such as “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” “The Alphabet Song” and the Spanish carol "Campanita del lugar."

But over time, popular lore has attributed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to no less than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who used the melody as the basis for his Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je, maman, K. 265 (1785), which Mao Fujita will perform in his SCP Piano recital on March 16.

Another common misbelief is that Mozart, as a child, wrote “Twinkle, Twinkle” for his elder sister, Nannerl.

The English lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” were written by Jane Taylor (1783-1824), an English poet and author. In 1806, her poem was first published in a collection of works by Taylor and her sister Ann called Rhymes for the Nursery. Written in couplet form, the work has five stanzas, although only the first one is widely known. The composer of the melody, often sung as a lullaby, remains a mystery. The melody was first published in Les Amusements d’une Heure et Demy (1761), a collection of music intended for garden parties.

The earliest known appearance of the words and music together dates to 1838. The combination of Taylor’s poem and the French melody has made “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” one of the world’s most familiar songs. Translated into many languages, it is sung by children and adults alike.

Mozart wasn’t the only classical-music composer inspired by the “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” melody. Haydn used it in the second movement of his Symphony No. 94 (Surprise), Saint-Säens quoted it in the 12th movement (“Fossils”) of his Carnival of the Animals and Ernst von Dohnányi did so in Variations on a Nursery Tune, Op. 25 (1914).

And in the pop-culture realm, as part of his “Star Trek” mission "to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before,” Leonard Nimoy riffed upon a star for the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Earth” on his debut disc “Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space” (1967). As the supreme Vulcan himself would say, “Live long and prosper.”