Date: 18 May 2008 22:24:03
About 10 days ago, the new conductor of our choir, GC, gave a concert in a local church. The title of the concert was Dichterliebe, the poet's love.
GC has a very fine baritone voice and he sang three cycles of Lieder accompanied by a pianist. The first cycle was poems by Heinrich Heine, a poet who I did not formally study at university. I stumbled across his poems at some point however and really loved them. It was delightful to hear 16 of them set to music by Robert Schumann.
I rushed home to dust off my yellowing copy of Buch der Lieder to remind myself of them again.
The first GC sang, was, appropriately "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" -
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
Als alle Knospen sprangen
Da ist in meinem Herzen
Die Liebe aufgegangen.
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
Als alle Vogel sangen
Da hab' ich ihr gestanden
Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.
[Non-rhyming off-the-cuff translation by Kerensa for her gentle readers:]
In the beautiful month of May
When all the buds were bursting forth
There, in my heart,
Love welled up.
In the beautiful month of May
When all the birds were singing
Then I confessed to her
All my longing and desire.
A simple, but heart-felt poem. And others were on a similar lovelorn theme.
The rest of the programme consisted of La Bonne Chanson (Paul Verlaine - Gabriel Fauré) a cycle of 9 songs in French and Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (Paul Morand - Maurice Ravel), a cycle of 3 songs in French. GC sang them all from memory. I think the choir has something to live up to!
It was a very pleasant way to spend a Thursday evening - especially as it was warm and during the interval we took our glasses of wine outside to drink on the church lawn. I joked with my Swiss German friend, who is a busy working woman and mother of four who usually does her ironing on Thursday evenings, that she had done well to give herself the evening off but wondered what would happen now that she was behind on her chores. I suggested she should have brought the ironing basket and board and set it up at the back of the church. We could set a whole new trend at concerts for women hard-pressed [oh! the pun, the pun!] for time to relax....
The evening had a somewhat sombre undertone however. The programme stated that the concert was given in memory of BF, whose mother was a long-standing member of my choir. (I don't know her personally). When I enquired, I was shocked to learn that BF, a young man of 22, had been murdered on a residential street in the Ancient Roman City at 4 pm on the Sunday afternoon after our Russian concert. How absolutely appalling.
RIP.