I’m getting ready to audition for some DC-area music groups and concert works, so A. and I are putting together my repertoire, or pieces that I can sing at a moment’s notice.
One type of music I’m just starting to work on is German lieder, or art songs. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about lieder:
Lied (German pronunciation: [ˈliːt]; plural Lieder, [ˈliːdɐ]) is a German word literally meaning “song”, usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf. Among English speakers “Lied” is often used interchangeably with “art song” to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages. The poetry forming the basis for Liederoften centers upon pastoral themes, or themes of romantic love.
Typically, Lieder are arranged for a single singer and piano, the Lied with orchestral accompaniment being a later development. Some of the most famous examples of Lieder are Schubert’s “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”) and “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. Sometimes Lieder are gathered in a Liederkreis or “song cycle“—a series of songs (generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme, such as Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, or Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben and Dichterliebe. Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann are most closely associated with this genre, mainly developed in the Romantic era.
A. lent me a book called Fifty Selected Songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss for High Voice. (What a mouthful! Also, they don’t seem all that high to me, so I’d hate to see the book for low voice.) I’ve been going through the lieder in it and deciding which I’d like to tackle. Here are three of my favorites:
Tonight, we were working on the Rachmaninoff Vocalise at the end of my lesson. A teenage student, K, whose lesson is after mine came in and sat down to listen to the end, as she occasionally does.
K had a Broadway book with her, and I asked if I could see it while our teacher was changing gears for K’s lesson. As I flipped through it, K said wistfully, “I bet those are all too easy for you.”
Leaving aside the fact that Broadway is actually harder for me than classical (and pop is ridiculously difficult), just because of the way my voice works…
Dude. Just over a year ago I thought I couldn’t even sing, and now high-school girls with just as much talent and twice as much energy as I have are sighing over my voice. Life is weird.
Dido’s Lament, from the opera “Dido and Aeneas.” Given that the character is dying, most of the interpretations I’ve seen are very dramatic. I like this rather cold, bloodless version for some reason, though. Probably because I’m not so much about the melodramatic. At least in my music.
I’ve been poking at this song on and off for a long time in lessons. Eventually I’ll perform it somewhere, but I’ve moved on to more challenging things, so this has never surfaced. Oddly, my teacher assigned this to a contralto to work on as well, so both her highest-and-lightest and lowest-and-darkest voices have worked on it in the past year.
Rediscovering the voice at 30
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