Could you imagine more than fifty songs from the same poem? Which poem would that be? And by which poet? The poem exists and it's by Goethe, of course; just eight short verses and it's one of his most important works. It was published in 1815 with a curious name, Ein Gleiches, that we could translate as "Another one." It has that name because in the first edition, there were two poems on the same page, one was called Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer's Nightsong) and the other was "Another one", i.e., another wanderer's nightsong. Not long ago, we listened to the Lied that Schubert wrote from the first poem, Wandrers Nachtlied I, and today we're listening to the one he wrote from the second which is, naturally, called Wandrers Nachtlied II. However, I’d like to tell you first the story of those famous verses, a story with two episodes fifty years apart.

 

Do you like tales? I do, very much. One of my favorite stories when I was a child was about a Princess whose father wanted to marry her with an old, solemn and boring Minister. The princess couldn't refuse him so she requested, as a pledge of love, a dress made of moonlight shafts which fit into half a nutshell; she was sure the Minister wouldn’t be able to get it. However, a few days later, the Princess had her dress so she demanded a second pledge of love: a dress made of sunlight shafts that that fit into half nutshell. When the Minister gave her the dress she had required, the Princess, then, made her last attempt: she wanted a cape made of a skin strip of each animal to be found in the Kingdom. As you can imagine, the Minister went back with the cape. The Princess didn't want to marry him by any means so that night, she covered herself with her new cape and fled [...]

 

Some songs are love at first sight. I hear them and immediately, I have to find out what, who, when and why. Above all though, I have to listen to them over and over again. This week's song is love at first sight. Strictly speaking is love at second sight (or hearing) because while I was listening and thinking how interesting it was, it was already over (songs can be short, very short or by Ned Rorem) and I had to listen back.

O you Whom I Often and Silently Come is, in fact, a song by Ned Rorem which was written in the summer of 1957, commissioned by an amateur singer, Luke Wilder Burnap. Mr. Burnap, if I got it right he was a Broadway producer, wanted to sing the songs with his own accompaniment with the virginals, a very popular [...]