Ranz des Vaches

A Ranz des Vaches or Kuhreihen is a simple melody traditionally played on the horn by the Swiss Alpine herdsmen as they drove their cattle to or from the pasture.

The fourth edition of 1826 gave scores for piano and was luxuriously illustrated, its intended market the educated early tourists to Switzerland.

It became somewhat of a topos in Romantic literature, and figures in the poem Der Schweizer by Achim von Arnim (1805) and in Clemens Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1809) as well as in the opera Le Chalet by Adolphe Charles Adam (1834) which was performed for Queen Victoria under the title The Swiss Cottage.

Perhaps the most famous of the Ranz des Vaches is the cor anglais and flute solo in the third section of the overture to Gioachino Rossini's opera William Tell, which has been used hundreds of times in many derivative works since its 1829 premiere, frequently to symbolize a pastoral setting.

Henry David Thoreau compared the song of the wood thrush to a ranz des vaches: "So there is something in the music of the cow bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink.