What do Franco Battiato and Elvis Presley have in common? Both did a cover of the same Art Song, a French romance, to be more precise. Other pop singers at some point in their career have also made an incursion into Art Song. This is what this post is about.

 

We are listening to some versions as sample, but as we have already listened to many of the original songs, I made "a posteriori" list with the related posts. This way you can go over them if you feel like it; I added a comment in every post with a link to the pop version in Youtube. Whenever we talk about other covers, I'll add them to the list; Also, if you happen to know another posted Lied that went Pop, please let me know and [...]

 

M. Glinka (lyrics by N.Kukolnik) “Proshaniye s Peterburgom” (“Farewell to Petersburg”), 1840 is a vocal cycle of 12 songs or ”romances” including the most popular themes of romanticism: love and jealousy, beauty of nature, sad remembrances, Oriental exotics and glorifying friendship. The beauty of Russian landscape is reflected in Zhavoronok (The Lark), and passion and jealousy of the lover in Bolero. My Fair Maiden. Mikhail Glinka (1804-1957), the great Russian composer was known for his “romances” (Russian equivalent of Lieder), and Nestor Kukolnik (1809-1869) was one of the most popular poets of the time.

 

In 1896, Jules Renard published Histoires naturelles (Nature stories), a book of stories whose main characters were animals: hens, turkeys, ducks, cocks, peacocks, pigeons, swans, dogs, cats, cows ... a long list. The book (and the animals’ list) was expanded in later editions until 1909; Renard died the following year. The first story is called Le chasseur d'images (Hunting for Pictures) and explains how someone leaves his house in the morning ready to observe everything he comes across along the day: “les yeux servent de filets où les images s'emprisonnent d'elles-mêmes” (the eyes act as nets where images are trapped). When he returns home, before bedtime, he examines those images. Then, we begin to read descriptions of the images, each one a story; most are short and others, hardly a line.

 

We get some posts about Schubert every year; he's the apple of my eye. Today, as we did last year and the year before, we are dedicating this post to him, as an homage in his death anniversary,  19th November 1828 (this year, the date happens to meet my posting day). I kept a subject for today, Schubert's “year of miracles”, 1815, during which he wrote 145 songs.

Elisa Rapado gave me the idea some months ago when she blogged about the Annus Mirabilis; she invited singers, pianists and people keen of Schubert to celebrate the 200th anniversary of that year.

 

A couple of weeks ago a reader commented about a lied that it was one of his favorite pieces of music and every time he listened to a new version, he discovered new nuances. A few days ago, I watched the documentary Conducting Mahler (highly recommended to Mahlerians) where Claudio Abbado said referring to a symphony: "if you love this piece, you’ll find and learn new things every time you listen to it." Abbado used the key word: love. We fall in love with a piece of work and, in sort of return to our love, it teaches us something new each time we listen to it. Of course, that won't happen all the time; sometimes, we like some pieces very much and we take great pleasure in listening to them (which is no mean feat!) but still, they contribute nothing new. Could this be a definition of a masterpiece? A work that, whenever is approached, feels like new, allows as many [...]