Singing madrigals

On Facebook I'm reminded by Sarah that we sometimes used to sing madrigals of an evening in Welwyn Garden City in the 1980s. Our children and some of their friends (that same Sarah) used to join in, and one of us modifed the name of the activity to Mad Wriggles. We used to stand in a circle to sing

Thomas Morley (1558-1602)

• Since first I saw your face (Ford)
• Never weather-beaten sail (Campion)

... they were the easier ones ...

• April is in my mistress' face (Morley)
• Sing we and chant it (Morley)
• Now is the month of maying (Morley)

and

• Adieu, sweet Amaryllis (Wilbye)

(There was an occasion when we set a flowering amaryllis in its pot in the centre of the circle for inspiration.)

Even further back: as a student at university I was in a madrigal group which used to sing on the college lawn, and before that I sang first soprano in our Madrigal Group (The New Elizabethans) at school. Further still, one of my earliest memories is of visiting my dad's "big" school as a small child and observing a select group of his pupils sit round a table on the school stage to sing in harmony ... guess what? ... Never weather-beaten sail.

We did the mad wriggles again here at our house, Saturday night, with Bill, Jennie, Gianluca, Dan, Vija, Rolf, Carmen and Frank. We were bottom-heavy in the distribution of parts, comprising three basses, three tenors, two altos and two sopranos, but for this sort of occasion it didn't matter. Towards the end, Bill insisted that we attempt Since first I saw your face without looking down at the music, even those of us who were new to it, and it worked.

When I was young and innocent I was unaware of some of the double-entendres in the Elizabethan madrigals, but it has now been pointed out to me that there's more to such songs as Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone (Farmer) than meets the eye at a first sight-reading.

Not complaining

Chris and I have had yet another discussion about how to interpret of Ich grolle nicht, the Heine poem set to music by Schumann in his Dichterliebe song cycle. Here's a literal translation of the German words showing the poet's and composer's emphasis on the word "heart" (Herz):

I bear no grudge, even when my heart is breaking,
eternally lost love! I bear no grudge.
Shine how you may in a magnificence of diamonds,
there falls no light into your heart's night.
That I have known for a long time.

I bear no grudge, even if my heart breaks.
Indeed I saw you in my dreams,
and saw the darkness in the chamber of your heart,
and saw the serpent feeding on your heart,
I saw, my love, how very wretched you are.
I bear no grudge.

In the Schumann setting, the climax (forte, top G in our copy ... top A in the original key) comes on the final repetition of "heart" in line 9.

Chris maintains that the words are sheer sarcasm and that the song should therefore be sung in an aggressive, furious manner, because actually he is complaining, very much. The girl has married another man, a rich man, what's more, hence the diamonds. The jilted lover is overwhelmed with sexual jealousy. The piano accompaniment would tend to bear out this assumption because it ends with a series of stabbing, staccato chords banged out with both hands.

However, the melody line for the singer is a lyrical flow, therefore I tend to disagree with this interpretation (also judging from the tone of some of the gentler, more forgiving songs in the cycle) and argue that the words could be taken literally. Because he loves her, the forsaken lover cannot blame this girl for being coerced into a marriage that doesn't suit her. In fact he feels sorry for her. With his poet's insight he empathises with her misery.

Is he singing to her, to himself, or to posterity?

It has just struck me that the poet-narrator / singer could be saying: "I won't complain to you because that would make you feel even more unhappy than you already are. I shall keep my own sufferings to myself"—thus making even more of a martyr of himself! In that case, of course, there's irony in the fact that, by singing about it, he's advertising his self-sacrifice to all and sundry.

The words were written 189 years ago, one of around 140 poems (!) within Heine's Buch der Lieder on the theme of unrequited love.

If you have the time and inclination to listen, here are three different interpretations by famous singers:

1. Fritz Wunderlich
2. Richard Tauber
3. Dietrich Fischer-Diskau

I like the first one best.

A round of German speakers?

The Konversationsgruppe met bei mir today, with Eva, Melita, Maude, Ursula, Elvira, Sabine, Hannan, Alba, Paule, Luci, Rosemary, Lolan and Annegret here for coffee, cakes and German practice. It must seem from the names that most of these friends of mine are German. However, only four spoke the language as their mother-tongue and one of those was Swiss and another hadn't lived in Germany for half a century or more. Altogether, we were from nine different countries.

We had the chairs in a circle so as to read a depressing article about the continuing adulation of Stalin whose reputation in Russia seems to have been enhanced by the opening of a Stalin Museum in Volgograd, the city that used to be known as Tsaritsyn ... then Stalingrad. A couple of weeks ago we'd studied another article about the controversial Adolf Hitler exhibition presented by the Deutsches Museum in Berlin, which is having an anything but positive effect on that dictator's reputation, so why are the Russians developing such selective memories, we wondered?

We don't always read and talk about such heavy stuff. Last week we were all laughing at a funny story by a Schwabian writer, Wolfgang Brenneisen, about a retired gentleman who, for the sake of appearances, had to keep taking his wife to the opera. The book it came from was Das Büchle vom Ruhestand (Eine heitere Anleitung in 24 Episoden).

We tend to call our conversation group as "die Runde." Chris sent me a link to an entertaining list of collective nouns today, among which is "a gaggle of women." Well yes, but that's rather derogatory.

"What would you call programmers?" he challenged me.

I came up with "a pondering of programmers."

Any other suggestions?

Being courteous

The Swiss have been making a fuss about their bankers' personal appearance and behaviour lately, and now I see that the Chinese are all set to teach their youngsters how to be respectful, putting good manners on the national syllabus, presumably with the assumption that their parents won't or won't be able to teach this themselves. In Canadian homes, schools and other environments the emphasis on this kind of education is well known, and it continues all the way up to adult level.

I called a friend about coming round for our Saturday supper followed by songs, and the very first thing she said in reply—in fact it's the first thing they all say—was "What can I bring?" Polite, considerate and kind, and it sounds so natural.

The trouble is, I never know how to answer that question. Is there a simple rule?

A full house

Two Japanese ladies with Petra from Germany

On Friday morning I was one of a big crowd at the residence of the Ambassador of Peru, on Island Park Drive, with a park opposite where most of us went for a walk on snowshoes before coming in for the refreshments.

It's a house with a history. During the second World War the Canadian family who lived there then looked after a dozen evacuee children who had crossed the Atlantic from Britain. In the reception room there's a photo of the children standing on the curved staircase. Our hostess (Mrs. Rosa Luz Garcia Rosell de Bellina) told us that three of them had come back for an emotional visit to their place of refuge very recently; they had been well cared for, here.

Fran and me, photo by Barbara Miles

Fran, telling everyone about her book

At our après snowshoe gatherings, the atmosphere is very informal. It's bound to be; with everyone in their casual clothes and woolly socks, the diplomats' wives and Canadians get to know one another more intimately than at the usual diplomatic receptions. On this occasion, Fran was encouraged to tell everyone about the book she has brought out, the one I mentioned recently, and a few of the company bought a copy from her. In another room, I sold photos and the photo-cards I make––the profits go towards the upkeep and replacement of the snowshoes and mukluks used by our group.

Our buffet table at the Residence

The splendid lunch shown here is a "pot luck" affair; we all bring something and volunteers set the table in an artistic manner. There's Yumiko, the tall lady with the long dark hair, who makes the Ikebana flower arrangements for us. (She's going to be demonstrating her skills at the National Library and Archives tomorrow.)

On Friday evening there weren't as many people as this at our own house, only Elva and Laurie this week, and a very relaxing evening it was, too. This Thursday though I'm expecting a larger than usual group of German speakers to come round, maybe 16 or more. I hope I can find enough chairs ... and had better get on with the preparation of snacks right away. Then next Saturday Chris and I will have a group of 10 or so friends here for supper and to do some singing of madrigals and rounds. We're looking forward to that.

Polyglot Facebook

As I was drifting off to sleep thinking of my Facebook Friends (I do that sometimes) it struck me how many different countries they come from. In the morning I counted them up—twenty-eight national origins (stretching a point, I suppose, by counting England, Scotland and Wales as distinct nationalities). Then I estimated that between them, my friends were regularly communicating in twenty different languages from five continents. Although I don't have any Africans on my list yet, I should have counted Africa, making it six continents, because I have frequently read messages and seen photos posted from there. In fact I travel the world every week browsing through people's photo albums. It's an education.

I'm not sure I correctly identified all the languages I counted (English, Flemish, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Croatian, Russian, Estonian, Indian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Arabic, Malay, Dutch, Romanian, German, Welsh, Hindi) and I may have come across more on Facebook without knowing it. The people on my current Friends list are—in alphabetical order so as to avoid accusations of favouritism—from Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, England, Estonia, Germany, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Macedonia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Romania, Spain, Scotland, Switzerland, Ukraine, the USA and Wales, although some did move away from their home countries before I met them and others have gone back to their home countries since I met them. Others again have moved to countries not yet on my list.

I posted a status report about my multiracial friends, adding Isn't that a wonderful thought? What is yet more wonderful is that I have noticed nothing extraordinary about this until now.

Syria, next?

After we've been to Beijing (wǒmen jīnnián wǔyuè qù běijīng––我们今年五月去北京) we're now also thinking of going to Aleppo, Syria, in November. A Scottish travel company called Eastern Approaches, guided by an expert historian and archeologist, offers a week's "in-depth look at Aleppo and the Dead Cities of North Syria, staying in a boutique hotel in the old city."

Tempting, is it not?