Ed's Place

Friday, May 28, 2021

Santoliquido: I canti della sera (with English translations)

L’assiola canta | Alba di luna sul bosco | Tristezze crepuscolare | L’incontro

Francesco Santoliquido: I canti della sera (“The Songs of the Evening”)
Italian composer Francesco Santoliquido (1883-1971) completed the music and lyrics of his earliest surviving songs, I canti della sera (“The Songs of the Evening”) in 1908. They were published by Ricordi in 1912, and the journal Musical America recommended them “as the finest of modern concert songs” in 1922. But, in addition to composing, Santoliquido published books of verse and short stories, and in 1937 and 1938 he penned several fascist, anti-Semitic articles, and also decried musical modernism. As a result he was effectively ostracized from the progressive arts community. Ironically, his third wife, pianist Ornella Pulti Santoliquido, had been a student of Alfredo Casella (a prominent Jewish-Italian composer and a particular target of Francesco's), and she became known as an advocate of modern music.

As these four evocative "evening songs" demonstrate, Santoliquido’s early style blends characteristics of Debussy and Richard Strauss (by way of Puccini!), but they do not yet show the influence of the Arabic music that colored his later works, the result of a nine-year sojourn to North Africa which began in 1912.

The first song, L’assiola canta (“The Horned Owl Sings”), is an invitation to share an intimate walk through the woods on a still, starry evening, interrupted only by the mournful sigh of an owl.

Alba di luna sul bosco (“Moonrise over the Woods”) artfully depicts the appearance of a red moon over the forest and its shimmering reflection caught on the surface of a pond; this in turn leads the poet to reflect on the surrounding vast stillness and peace, and how such a perfect sense of communion mirrors, or perhaps even inspires newly found love.

As its title suggests, the mood of Tristezze crepuscolare (“Twilight Gloom”) changes from peaceful contemplation to sorrowful angst and agitation as the incessant pealing of evening church bells unearths painful memories of a lost love.

The final song, L’incontro (“The Encounter”), ends the cycle on a more hopeful note as it relates the happy reunion of a couple who years before had enjoyed a similar twilight flirtation, with evening bells and sqwaking seabirds now heard in the distance, just the same as before. The accompaniment includes rhythmic patterns similar to those used in the preceding songs, perhaps suggestive of the imperfectly-recalled memories mentioned in the lyrics.

I canti della sera ("The Songs of the Evening")
Italian lyrics by the composer (1908)

Reynaldo Hahn: Venezia (with English translations)

1. Sopra l’acqua indormenzada | 2. La Barcheta | 3. L’Avertimento
4. La Biondina in gondoleta | 5. Che pecà!

Notes & English translations, ©2014 by Edward Lein; all rights reserved.
Please notify & credit when reprinting: edward_lein@hotmail.com
ORIGINAL MUSIC & WRITINGS: LEINmachine | Art Song Translations

By his fourth birthday, Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) had moved with his wealthy family from Venezuela to Paris, France, but not before his prodigious musical talents had already begun to manifest—in 1878, Venezuelan poet José Maria Samper published A Reinaldo Hahn (niño a tres años y medio), an ode about the three-and-a-half-year-old singer “Foretelling the symphonies / Of another Beethoven perhaps.” By the age of six Hahn was making the rounds as a salon singer, accompanying himself at the piano in the apartments of Parisian socialites, and by eight he had begun composing his own songs. At 11 he entered the Paris Conservatory, where he excelled as conductor and composer, with Massenet and Saint-Saëns as his particular champions. As conductor, Hahn was a recognized Mozart specialist, and in 1906 he conducted Don Giovanni at the first Mozart Festival in Salzburg, Austria. In addition to composing and conducting, in 1909 he began a career as a respected music critic, and in 1945-1946 was named director of the Paris Opéra. He was an intimate friend of author Marcel Proust, who, in his unfinished early novel Jean Santeuil, portrayed the witty Hahn as a genius. But even less personal observers recalled Hahn’s extraordinary charisma, and how as a singer he was so attuned to the meaning behind the words that he could make poets weep when he performed—this though Hahn’s baritone voice was not in itself particularly memorable nor well-disciplined, with him going so far as to sing with a cigarette dangling from his lips (which, one supposes, was pretty memorable all by itself). Hahn wrote a variety of dramatic, instrumental and vocal music, and is remembered especially for his art-song mélodies.

Although the Venezia cycle was published in 1919, the songs date from 1901, when Hahn first visited Venice while travelling with his mother. As Thea Sikora Engelson observes in The Mélodies of Reynaldo Hahn (2006), the composer made a point of distinguishing the folksy chansons of Venezia, meant to mimic the style of Venetian popular songs, from the rest of his more classically-inspired mélodies, and the set includes a sixth piece, La primavera, for soprano and tenor soloists with chorus. In addition to setting verses in the local dialect (for which he provided a pronunciation guide), to pay further homage to his beloved Venice Hahn opens with the barcarolle rhythm of the gondoliers; and in the second song Engelson suggests he uses the piano to conjure oar strokes rippling through the canals that lace the city.

1. Sopra l’acqua indormenzada

2. La Barcheta

3. L’Avertimento

4. La Biondina in gondoleta

5. Che pecà!

Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Gretchen am Spinnrade, and Ständchen (with English translations)

English translations ©2012-2013 by Edward Lein; all rights reserved.
Please notify and credit when reprinting: edward_lein@hotmail.com
ORIGINAL MUSIC & WRITINGS: LEINmachine | Art Song Translations

Die schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Mill-maiden) on poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827)

Although Beethoven's lovely An die ferne Geliebte ("To the Distant Beloved," 1816) is generally cited as being the first "song cycle," Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin ("The Miller's Lovely Daughter," 1823-24) is the first song cycle of its own type. Beethoven's cycle is one continuous movement with several contrasting sections, along the lines of a sung fantasia, in which music from the beginning returns at the end so as to form a kind of musical circle. In contrast, Schubert composed a set of related songs intended to be performed as a group in a specified order, but each of the 20 songs is nonetheless self-contained, and so may also stand alone as a separate piece. Thus, Schubert's concept of the song cycle is more in keeping with a Baroque-era solo cantata, with piano accompaniment. And it is Schubert's model more than Beethoven's which has provided inspiration for song cycles by later composers, from Schumann and Mahler to Britten and Barber, and beyond.

In truth, Schubert's groundbreaking work, first published in 1824, was really the concept of German poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827). In 1820, when Müller published his cycle of 25 poems about a young miller’s apprentice who finds but then loses love, he intended them as song lyrics, and later wrote a friend that he hoped "... a kindred spirit may some day be found, whose ear will catch the melodies from my words, and who will give me back my own" (Schubert Songs, by Maurice J.E. Brown). Although Schubert chose a number of Müller's poems as texts for other songs as well, including those of another great cycle, Winterreise ("Winter Journey," 1828), there is no evidence that Müller ever knew that his "kindred spirit" indeed had been found, and that Schubert used his words to create unsurpassed musical masterpieces.

Gretchen am Spinnrade & Ständchen

Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel," Op.2, D. 118, 1814) was the first work that brought Schubert, not yet 17 years old, to the attention of Viennese music-lovers, and it is still regarded as among the finest of all German Lieder. The text, drawn from Goethe's Faust (Part 1), relays the obsessive confusion, bordering on despair, of the still innocent Gretchen after she has become infatuated with Faust, but then is seemingly deserted by him (oh, that she had been!). The motion of Schubert's piano part reflects not only the whirring of the spinning wheel, but also Gretchen's increasingly agitated emotional state.

Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel")

Ständchen (Serenade)
Following Schubert's Ave Maria, D. 839, his Ständchen (Serenade), D.957, no.4, must come in as a close second among his most-beloved songs, and, as with Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, Schubert's popular "Swan Song" has been arranged for practically every performance ensemble imaginable. "Leise flehen meine Lieder," is the first line of the text by German poet Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) that served as Schubert's inspiration.

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with English translations of Tristan Klingsor's poems)

Notes and English version ©2009, by Edward Lein; all rights reserved.
Please notify & credit when reprinting: edward_lein@hotmail.com

ORIGINAL COMPOSITIONS & WRITINGS: LEINmachine | Art Song Translations

Ravel / Klingsor: Shéhérazade
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) composed his magically evocative song cycle, Shéhérazade, in 1903 (the same year as his String Quartet and the first movement of his Sonatine for piano solo), setting for high voice and piano three poems by his friend, Tristan Klingsor (pseudonym of Léon Leclère, 1874-1966). The orchestral version soon followed, and it seems likely that the orchestrations were as much a part of Ravel's original conception as the vocal part and harmonies. The cycle was written for either soprano or tenor, and although it is seldom performed by a man, in 2004 baritone Konrad Jarnot released a recording with pianist Helmut Deutsch.

In 1903, Klingsor published a collection of 100 poems inspired by reading the Middle Eastern folktales known collectively as One Thousand and One Nights (or, Arabian Nights) which lately had been published in a French translation. He titled his poetry collection Schéhérazade, chosen in homage to Rimsky-Korsakov's similarly inspired symphonic suite, of which both he and Ravel were fans--it is perhaps significant that at the mention of "Sinbad" toward the end of the first song the solo violin, featured so prominently in Rimsky Korsakov's suite, can be heard in Ravel's orchestral setting (albeit doubled an octave below by Ravel). Ravel and Klingsor were likewise big fans of Debussy's revolutionary opera Pelléas et Mélisande, and they reportedly attended all 14 performances of the opera's premiere run in 1902.[1] When Ravel decided to set three of Klingsor's poems he made the poet re-read the lines aloud repeatedly, hoping to capture the rhythms of French speech patterns as perfectly as had Debussy.

Often warm and glittering but suffused with a melancholy longing, Ravel's music transforms our understanding of the poetry, particularly in the first and final songs. When first performed in 1904, Asie was sung as the last rather than first song. But when it came time to publish the score the composer changed the order of the songs, instead concluding with L'indifférent, in which Ravel "once suggested that the key to his own personality lay hidden ..." [2]

On the surface, Asie appears to be little more than a catalog of exotic enticements available to travelers--but the music suggests that the narrator is someone who feels trapped in a mundane existence, with the only likely escape found in reading the adventures of others.

La flûte enchantée is a straightforward depiction of romantic yearning as it relates how lovers, separated by constraints of servitude, discover that they can still form an immediate connection through music.

At first reading, L'indifférent comes across merely as a libertine eyeing a would-be conquest; but through the music one is left instead with the impression of a traveler isolated in a foreign land hoping to make any sort of human contact to overcome deep loneliness, but who seems somehow emotionally powerless to interact. It becomes almost as though Klingsor, when heard through the amplification of Ravel's music, has captured in a few lines what Thomas Mann related in his 1912 novella, Death in Venice.

FOOTNOTES
1. Ravel and Klingsor, among other young Parisian musicians, painters and writers, formed a society called Les Apaches whose purpose was to promote ground-breaking artistic achievements, and mutually supporting Debussy's controversial opera was chief among their efforts.
2. Quoting EMI producer Ronald Kinloch Anderson in his notes for the Janet Baker/Sir John Barbirolli recording re-released in 1975.

Note on the translations:
Ravel was exacting in his rhythmic setting of the French text, and the intent in my English version was to match the rhythm of the French original, syllable for syllable as closely as I could (but not with the intent that the English version might be substituted in performance!). Consequently a few words, mostly adjectives, not explicit in the French have been added to "fill-in-the-blanks" of the English -- these additions appear in gray font, and I would have no problem if they were omitted in reprinting. Less frequently a French word or two may have been omitted as long as the meaning isn't altered. A few other minor liberties have been taken in hope of making the English sound a little more linguistically idiomatic or "poetic," e.g., in the third line, "Où dort la fantaisie ..." which literally translates as "Where sleeps the fantasy ..." has been rendered: "Where sleeping fantasy lies ..."

Asie

La flûte enchantée

L'indifférent

Monday, May 20, 2019

Home Sweet Home

Sunday, May 19, 2019

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14