Why do we say "Qué Será, Será"?

Meaning:

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Background:

This Spanish saying translates to “What will be, will be,” and it means one can’t influence the future; what is going to happen is going to happen and there’s not much you can do about it.

Those of us of a certain age can’t hear this phrase without thinking of Doris Day's performance of the song Qué Será, Será in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock classic film The Man Who Knew Too Much. It’s a complicated and very exciting plot so I won’t recount the whole thing here, but Day plays a mother whose son has been kidnapped. Toward the end of the movie, she sings the song (loudly) in a location where she thinks the child is being held. He hears her and whistles the chorus back, allowing his father (played by Jimmy Stewart) to find and rescue him. The tune, written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song and Day’s version of it spent 27 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at #2, where it sat for three consecutive weeks. It became Day’s theme song, sung in subsequent movies and played as the intro to her sitcom, The Doris Day Show (1968 – 1973).

Although the movie and hit song popularized the saying, it’s actually much older, and surprisingly, it arose in England.

There are two versions of the idiom that appeared in the mid-16th century, and it’s hard to know which came first. The better-known Spanish spelling - qué será, será - can be traced to a 1559 brass plaque in the Church of St. Nicholas, Thames Ditton, Surrey. (The plaque commemorates the deaths of Erasmus and Julyan Forde, for those who are curious.)

The phrase also appears, spelled in Italian as che sarà sarà, as the family motto for the Earls of Bedford. Legend has it that John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, adopted it after barely surviving the Battle of Pavia in 1525, and that he specifically requested it be engraved on his tomb. Some scholars believe that documentary evidence, however, points to his son, Frances Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, as the person who formalized the saying’s association with the family. It’s recorded in a 1582 manuscript and remains the family motto today.

Playwright Christopher Marlowe included a third variation, che sera sera, in his 1590 masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, in Act 1, Scene 1. Shakespeare also used a similar English phrase in Act 4, Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet says, “What must be, shall be.”

Interestingly, the 1950s song was inspired by the Italian version employed by the Earls of Bedford. Davidson, the tune’s composer, was watching the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa and noticed che sarà sarà carved in the stone over the entryway of the fictional Italian family’s mansion. He immediately wrote the phrase down as a potential song title. Evans then decided to use the Spanish version in the lyrics because he felt more people spoke that language than Italian.

Needless to say, the phrase qué será, será is alive and well today. It’s used widely, and most understand its meaning.

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