Ríu Ríu Chíu

The story

"Ríu Ríu Chíu", sometimes shortened to "Ríu Ríu" or "Ríu Chíu", is a Spanish villancico, a Renaissance song now sung as a Christmas carol and tied to the Feast of the Immaculate Conception during Advent. Some sources attribute it to Mateo Flecha the Elder, who died in 1553; others call it anonymous. It closely resembles another villancico, "Falalanlera", by the Aragonese composer Bartomeu Càrceres. It survives in a single source, the Cancionero de Upsala, printed in Venice in 1556, where it is the fortieth song; the one known copy is kept in the library of the University of Uppsala. The musicologist Daniel R. Melamed called it "redoubtable" and a contender for the best-known piece of Renaissance music.

The apparently nonsense syllables of its refrain are often taken for the song of a nightingale, though the context and the etymology fit the call of a kingfisher; "riu" is also the Catalan word for river, the sense in which the Monkees later sang it. The song's theme is the birth of Christ. It tells of God guarding the Lamb from the wolf, and of the Virgin defended from the raging wolf and free of original sin; it speaks of the Incarnation, of the prophecies fulfilled, and of a thousand angels singing to the shepherds of glory in heaven and peace on earth.

Early-music ensembles took it up in the 20th century, among them the Boston Camerata, the Oxford Camerata, the Waverly Consort (1977), the King's Singers (1989) and Chanticleer (1990). The Kingston Trio recorded it as "Guardo el Lobo" in 1961, credited to the musicologist Erich Schwandt, and Chip Douglas sang it with the Modern Folk Quartet in 1964 before, as the Monkees' producer, he brought it to the group, who performed it on their Christmas television episode in 1967. It was sung in Spanish at King's College, Cambridge, in the broadcast Nine Lessons and Carols of Christmas Eve 1992.

What it says

A Christmas villancico about how God kept the wolf from his Lamb: the Virgin, whom the wolf sought to bite, was preserved from original sin, and the child now born is the great King, God made flesh, whose birth the angels announce with peace to the world. Its bird-call refrain makes it bright and dancing.

The words