Tulips from Amsterdam

With those beautiful photos of the tulip day in Amsterdam, I spontaneously had to think back to the song 'tulips from Amsterdam', but did you know that it was actually a German song?

Original text:

When spring comes,

then I will send you

Tulips from Amsterdam.

When spring comes,

then I will pick for you

Tulips from Amsterdam.

When I come back,

then I will bring you tulips from Amsterdam,

a thousand red, a thousand yellow,

everyone wishes you the same.

What my mouth cannot say,

say Tulips from Amsterdam.

Tulips from Amsterdam (Tulpen aus Amsterdam, Tulips from Amsterdam) is a song from 1956 composed by the German schlager composer Ralf Arnie, originally written in German by singer-songwriter Klaus Gunter Neumann and lyricist Ernst Bader.

The song tells about a thousand red and yellow tulips from Amsterdam that are sent to show loyalty and love. Neumann had been on a day trip to the Bulb Region during a visit to the Netherlands in 1953 after a performance at the Amsterdam Theater Tuschinski. Shortly thereafter, he wrote the first version of the song, but his publisher was not enthusiastic and a recording did not follow.

Three years later, Ernst Bader picked up the idea, he adapted the text and asked Ralf Arnie (pseudonym of Dieter Rasch) to write a different melody for it. Arnie refers in the melody to the Flower Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. Tulips from Amsterdam was translated into Dutch by Lammy van den Hout under his pseudonym Erik Franssen together with Johnny Steggerda under his pseudonym of Van Aleda. The song was recorded in the Polydor studios in Berlin by the Flemish singer Jean Walter, who had ended up in Berlin due to World War II, accompanied by the orchestra of conductor Werner Müller.