My translation of the Raffin tune list is the product of many years of effort and is by no means perfect or complete. It began in January 1990 with what seemed like a perfectly simple project at the onset and turned into tremendous frustration and an education for me. The first edition was the work of a German-American woman who kindly came to my rescue when several people I hired to do it failed to produce. My wife also spent a good deal of time with a German/English dictionary trying to make the literal translations make more sense. Several customers have made large contributions through the years to keep it current and it is a continuing effort. I hope you will find it somewhat useful.

It is not always possible to translate foreign languages word for word into English, and song titles sometimes contain subtleties that make it even more difficult. There are also cases where we Americans know the tune by a completely different name than the translated German. We caught some of these, but I am confident there are those we have missed. In other cases the titles were not in German, but in French, Italian, Spanish, or Dutch. Some of these like "La Paloma" we know by their foreign name, in other cases we did the best we could. Where possible we translated these other languages, otherwise the foreign word was left standing. I also simply copied German words, which were not translatable.

I am convinced that I could spend the rest of my life on this project, but for now this is as good as it gets. I really believe it serves the intended purpose, and I hope you find it useful. Over the years I have attempted to keep the list up to date and will continue to do so. Any help you care to offer to improve this list will be greatly appreciated.