The second Ode to Lotta song is “Rise Up, My Love,” which appears in the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. As a youth in the 1920s, Lotta Hitschmanova was surrounded by love, and her new country of Czechoslovakia was thriving.

Lotta loved languages. Her mother spoke German to the children, a live-in nanny spoke Czech, while a Swiss governess taught them French.

In 1929, Lotta enrolled at the University of Prague, where she excelled at languages. From 1933 to 1935, she studied political science and journalism at the Sorbonne in Paris, before returning to Prague, where she received her PhD in French Literature.

About the song. As a boy chorister I delighted in singing Healey Willan’s setting of “Rise Up, My Love”, a true gem. The beautiful imagery of this text drew me to write my own setting. It’s in a very different style, as I wanted to respect the musical space that Willan had explored in his little masterpiece. My song was written as a wedding present for my daughter Salima and son-in-law Tarik.

The world premiere of the song was given by Kari Turunen and the Vancouver Chamber Choir on Nov 28, 2025. The short clip here of that performance starts off with the words, “The flowers appear on the earth.”

Lotta had a special love for flowers.

On one of her many humanitarian trips to Asia in the 1950s, Lotta caught a lift on a noisy RCAF military transport plane. During a two-day layover in the Aleutian Islands, she gathered bundles of wild flowers and manufactured a number of vases from aluminum foil.

When the crew arrived at the aircraft ready to depart, the whole plane was tastefully decorated with little nosegays in most of the aircraft windows.

And wherever she travelled, Lotta’s supporters knew that she would be deeply touched by the gift of some flowers to put in the room that she was staying in.

Stay tuned for the next instalment on the Road to #OdeToLotta…..

And for tickets to the Nov 28 Ode to Lotta concert in Vancouver, click here.