It’s the 4th Sunday of Advent, the day before Christmas Eve, the snow is falling again outside my parents’ home in a suburb north of Copenhagen. All my presents are ready and wrapped, and I feel so content and happy. I thought I’d share some holiday cheer by posting one of my favorite Christmas carols, the German hymn “Schönster Lord Jesu“, also known in English as “Fairest Lord Jesus“.
Now, this may seem a strange choice for any potential German or English readers out there. In the German and English version, the song is not a carol at all, it is simply a hymn and may be sung all year round. I, however, am mostly familiar with the Danish version by poet B.S. Ingemann, “Dejlig er jorden”.
Ingemann was same poet who did the translation of “Silent Night” (which I mentioned here), and like with “Silent Night” Ingemann took some liberties with the material at hand, but in the case of “Schönster Herr Jesu” he did a much better job, I think. What he did was that he turned the hymn into a Christmas carol, albeit in a very simple, discreet manner. He maintains the essence of the German lyrics, which is to praise eartlhy loveliness and praising the heavenly splendor (the English version is mostly devoted to the praising of Jesus). However, in the last stanza Ingemann links it all to one glorious moment in time, that is, the hour when the lord was born and the shepherds learned of their salvation from heavenly angels. The Danish lyrics go, directly translated:
The earth is lovely, God’s heaven is glorious,
Beautiful is the pilgrimage of our souls!
Through the fair kingdoms on earth,
We walk towards Paradise, singing!
Times shall come, times shall roll over us
Generations shall follow the passing of generations
The tone from heaven shall never cease
In the happy pilgrimage of the soul.
The angels first sang it to the shepherds in the field
Beautifully from soul to soul it rang:
“Peace on earth! Man, rejoice!
An eternal savior is born onto us!”
Effective, yet simple. It is difficult to think of a more striking imagery of heavenly beauty on earth than that of the lowly shepherds being visited by angels, and I like how Ingemann doesn’t try to wrap things up in a conclusive fourth stanza. The words of the angels are allowed to stand alone, along with the image of the shepherds and the angels. “Dejlig er jorden” is a Danish Christmas classic, although the Swedes have embraced the carol as well, using it sometimes as a funeral hymn. It does seem appropriate for such a purpose: Whenever we are singing it, walking around the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, joined hands as per Danish custom, the second stanza marks a moment of quiet reflection for me, a reminder of loved ones who have passed away, but also of the life and joy that has yet to come. I am not a Christian, and I cannot truly believe that there is a heavenly note that will sound on earth till the end of time. But I love to be alive in a world that is able to conjure up an idea as beautiful as that – a note ringing from heaven! – and there are plenty earthly things to be happy about. This Christmas Eve, walking around my parents’ Christmas tree, I am sure the verse about the “passing of generations” will make me think affectionately of the baby that my brother’s wife is expecting, a little boy who is to be born early in the new year, making my parents grandparents and me an aunt for the first time. And maybe I will also be thinking a little bit about the little Christmas tree I have waiting for myself and my boyfriend when we return from our respective families to celebrate our first Christmas together in his apartment, in which I moved in in October this year. The earth is indeed lovely.
Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols has been an essential part of my Christmases for several years now. Annina Teatime first introduced me to it, and she did a lovely post about it back when we were Confidential Attachées here, and I don’t really have much to add. It’s simply a beautiful work, with a quiet, serene Christmas atmosphere to it that’s so much different from the one you find in crowded, loud department stores this time of year. And “Balulalow” is a jewel of a song.
Yes, the snow is still falling. This is what the yard behind my building looked like this afternoon.
Last week I complained about the general sort of bland state of Danish Christmas carols, a blandness that, however, is not paralleled by the carol tradition of our Northern brother country, Sweden. The Swedes are excellent at keeping their traditional music alive, and while genres like ballads and folk songs and folk music are mostly thought of as things of an ancient past in Denmark, in Sweden the likes of Jan Johansson have managed to keep folk music alive and allowed it to evolve and adapt to more recent music. I think this shows in the Swedes Christmas carols as well. Swedish Christmas carols are wonderful, with a unique, old kind of sound to them, and below are a few of my favourites:
Jul, jul, strålande jul
Try listening to that one without getting goosebumps and misty eyes. I dare you! “Jul, jul, strålande jul” is simply breathtaking and ideal for being sung polyphonically by a choir as in the above video. It is at once warm and hearty and grandiose, and the lyrics are beautiful as well: they address Christmas like an apostrophe, asking it to shine over white forests, over the passing of old generations and over the lives of young people, over raging wars and the sighs of young children. I also like how the white forests are a recurring motif in the lyrics – connecting the Swedish wintry landscape with the Christian tradition of Christmas.
Gläns över sjö och strand
I love how this one goes back and forth between a minor and major key, one of the thing that Swedish folk music excels at, in my opinion. There’s an even more folk tone-y version of this carol for the thus inclined, composed by Widéen. I’m usually all about the folk music, but I actually prefer the above original version, by Alice Tegner, for its solemnity. That version was also featured in the excellent TV series based on Astrid Lindgren’s Madicken of June Hill books – sung by Madicken and her family on Christmas Eve (song starts up at 25:25).
Det strålar en stjärna
This video version is from Lucia Day in Sweden which is appropriate since I first heard “Det strålar en stjärna” on Lucia Day five years ago. I was living in a student hall that accommodate a lot of Swedish exchange students at the time, and while Lucia Day is also a thing in Denmark, the Swedes have a much more elaborate tradition when it comes to celebrating December 13, so the women among the Swedish students took it upon themselves to wake the rest of us up by way of a Lucia parade (as described by me here), and they sang this beautiful carol about the star of Christmas, shining brighter every day as the holidays approach.
It’s the advent season and I am almost a little overwhelmed with Christmas spirit this year. The snow started falling two days ago, and when I woke up this morning, everything was white and pretty and festive outside. Just look at these lovely pictures I snapped in Fælledparken as I went for a walk in the afternoon:
I decided that blogging about some of my favorite advent and Christmas songs might provide me with an appropriate outlet for all this snow white festivity, and I’ll start today, on the first Sunday of Advent.
I’ve already blogged about “Coventry Carol” once before, but that was in a completely different context, and I thought it could stand another mention. As a Christmas song, it has a special place in my heart. The thing is, being Danish, I naturally grew up with Danish Christmas carols, and as lovely as some of them are, a lot of them are also kind of, well, toothless. They’re almost always in a major key, and they tend to tip-toe around any potential dangerous subject matter to a point where they manage to not really say anything. A good example is the Danish version of “Silent Night”. I love the original German and the English version of “Silent Night”. I feel like they succeed, lyric-wise, by carefully choosing their motif and focusing on this motif, making the most of it: The (virgin) mother and child in the quiet of night, the shepherds and their angelic visitation, the savior promising an eternal dawn to all of mankind. The Danish version, however, is an extremely free and fairly nonsensical translation. Directly translated, it goes: “Happy Christmas, lovely Christmas, angels descend into hiding. They fly here with paradise green [boughs or leaves, supposedly], seeing what God finds to be beautiful. They walk secretly among us.”
What is this thing about angels falling down in hiding? Did angels ever actually do that in the bible? Not in the story of Christmas, that’s for sure, they were pretty in yer face with those shepherds in the bible. Also, what is this greenery from paradise and what is its significance? And that last line sounds more like a tagline from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers than anything else. This is all very symptomatic of Danish carols: Even the original Danish ones, especially the ones from the 19th century, will generally go to great lengths in terms of weird imagery in order to avoid mentioning the events surrounding the birth of Christ. Which is a shame because even I, atheist that I am, think that the story of the birth of Jesus is pretty neat.
This is exactly why I like “Coventry Carol” so much. The “Coventry Carol” is very upfront about the story of the birth of Christ, and it certainly does not try to sugarcoat it or tiptoe around anything. Written as a lullaby sung by a mother of a baby boy in Bethlehem (arguably the virgin Mary, but I suppose it could be ascribed to any Bethlehem mother), it deals with the massacre ordered by King Herod, claiming the life of every male child under the age of two.
Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay. Lullay, thou little tiny Child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do, For to preserve this day This poor youngling for whom we do sing Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Herod, the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor Child for Thee! And ever mourn and sigh, For thy parting neither say nor sing, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Is this Christmassy in the modern sense of the word? Is it nice and cosy? Not at all! But it lends some gravity to the story of Christmas. The massacre of the innocents was gruesome, but it’s a central part of the canonical Christmas story, and it makes the story of Christmas all the more significant. It’s a little like the advent song “O come, o come, Emmanuel”, and the carol “Maria durch ein Dornwald ging”, both of which describe hardships (of the people of Israel and of pregnant Mary, respectively) rather than merry-making. And then the melody of the “Coventry Carol” is just so incredibly gorgeous. The lyrics and the music date back from a mystery play from the 17th century, and it does have that pentatonic, old-timey ring to it. But more importantly it is written in a sinister minor key that I think the holidays need as much as they do the major key melodies.I grew up with a recording of a chorus singing it, and I actually do prefer it in a choir version as I feel it easily turns into a little too much of a tearjerker when sung by a solo soprano. I also noticed that Andrea Arnold had the traveling brass band in the childhood Christmas scene play the carol in her fetching Wuthering Heights, and this also worked nicely. Here it is, sung by the Collegium Vocale Gent:
Summer has come to Denmark, it is sunny and warm, and I am happy, happier than I have been in a long time.
I thought I would celebrate by posting this wonderful piece uploaded recently by The Danish String Quartet. As the description on youtube says, it’s a piece of Danish folk music from a village, Sønderho, in Western Denmark – the second tune in a set of three wedding tunes, several centuries old.
It’s such a lovely piece, it almost brings tears to my eyes. Happy tears. And I think the iPhone recording by the string quartet is a great, inventive variation of the usually rather dull steady-cam recording of string quartet performances. I hope that you will like it, dear readers, and that you, too, are enjoying a wonderful early summer.
Edited because I wrote “Matteo DE Perugia” the entire way through the first time around. I suck.
Just a little season-appropriate music for you all to enjoy: Matteo da Perugia’s “Helas, avril”.
I first heard this piece when I was working for a Copenhagen sinfonietta in the autumn of 2010. The ensemble toured Sweden with a programme that included a re-composed version of da Perugia’s song. I had the responsibility for all the practicalities of the concerts, I was fresh out of the university and nervous that I would screw up somehow, but this song stopped me in my tracks and made me forget everything around me for a moment. I have returned to the piece several time since. It conveys such a beautiful sadness, and with that ancient tonality that always induces in me a sense of something distant and otherwordly. I regret that I’m not able to link to my favourite recording of the piece, namely that by ensemble Mala Punica. There’s a kind of modern sound to their interpretation of the song, and I miss that in the above recording which seems to strive towards a medieval atmosphere. It’s a matter of taste of course, but I do think that the modern sound and ensemble Mala Punica’s focus on the soloist’s voice do a good job at bringing out the secularity of the song, which is indeed a love song.
The lyrics present a persona who is infnitely sad despite the loveliness of the month of April, because he misses his beloved. As an earlier blog post betrays I have studied French medieval poetry a bit, and I remember learning that spring was frequently referred to by medieval European troubadours in their love songs as the season of love. I like how in “Helas avril” the joys of Spring are so directly contrasted by the inner life of the lovelorn protagonist.
You can read lyrics are, translated by Michel Chasteau:
April, alas, your sweet return has brought me
greater pain than I can well express,
seeing you so fair, so fresh and merry
bedecked with flowers, happy and carefree,
filled with scents of joy, while all I have
is memories of love, regrets and tears.
How eagerly would I go to meet sweet death
in this your season, ending thus my life
in defiance of Fate
and its power,
Since in your span I cannot see my lady,
And there is nothing I desire to see
apart from her
And that’s the truth
Your sight brings me the greater grief because
I feed distress wit inner agitation.
So do I pine, and must for ever pine
Until I see her noble form once more
And May will find me still complaining
if Mercy does not come to my assistance.
April, alas…
Apropos of modern interpretations of this song, the phrase “Hélas, avril” also appears in “La Javanaise” by the wonderful Serge Gainsbourg:
I have no idea if the lyrics are a reference to the 15th century song, but I like to think that they are. A casual medieval poetry quote would add even more swag to Gainsbourg than he already had, if that’s even possible.
I’m obsessed with Schubert at the moment. This isn’t all that surprising: I tend to be all about Schubert in January, because Winterreise is just so perfect for this month: Bleak and cold, with no warm, prosperous spring waiting just around the corner. The excellent Jessica Duchen wrote a post about Schubert recently and makes some striking observations:
In Schubert, the major tonality is more tragic than the minor. It is the way he switches between them that rips at our innards. What is he doing? What is he saying? Recognition of darkness turns to acceptance of it, maybe. Or to seeing the beauty beyond it. Or to welcoming it. Or to extending compassion to everyone for it, with a wry smile through the tears. I believe that in the change from minor to major he is not only recognising the darkness and transforming it, but empathising with both sides of it, and with us all: in that switch, for Schubert, lies the essence of the human condition.
This is so accurate, I think. The major tonality has always been what moved me the most about Winterreise, exactly because it never signified to me something as banal as a glimpse of hope or optimisim or springtime. To me the switch to major tonality in the opening lied “Gute Nacht” has always been what solidified the sadness of it, and set the tone for the rest of the lied cycle which, I believe, is a cycle about an infitine, hopeless sadness. To me, the major tonality in this lied, and the rest of the lieder, signifies the recognition of the lost beauty, or love, or happiness without which the sadness would be bearable.
(from Ian Bostridge’s wonderful, staged Winterreise)
The change goes so well with the lyrics, too:
Will dich im Traum nicht stören,
Wär schad’ um deine Ruh’.
Sollst meinen Tritt nicht hören -
Sacht, sacht die Türe zu !
Schreib im Vorübergehen
Ans Tor dir: Gute Nacht,
Damit du mögest sehen,
An dich hab’ ich gedacht.
If there was nothing to the lied cycle but the bitter resolution expressed in the first three stanzas (“Was soll ich länger weilen…?”), surely there would be no lied cycle at all. The persona would have marched right out of the wintry little town with rapid steps, as indicated by the resolute walking pace of the lied (also noted by Duchen). Spring would have come. But the persona lingers because of course there is something other than the bitterness. There is a tenderness and a love that, tragically, seems to live on the frail constitution of the persona amid the frozen landscape, like the crow that is hoping to pick the persona’s bones after his death, and it creeps into every lied in the cycle, making the cycle the masterpiece that it is.
Am I reading too much into Schubert’s music, putting words in his mouth? Likely. But I feel like it’s more the other way around: Schubert puts notes into my mouth. Even in the pieces that are purely instrumental, I always feel like he is using music as a universal language and speaking to me directly and extremely eloquently through it. Like in the second movement of his piano trio in E flat, which Duchen also posts and which happens to be one of my favourite pieces of any classical music:
I feel like I understand exactly what Schubert is saying here, as plainly as if he had been speaking in my native tongue, except that his music makes him capable of expressing sentiments so complex and nuanced that words would never be able to cover it. There’s something in there about frustration, something about sorrow and longing, and something about an obstacle, but also something about determination. And something very basic about breathing, one’s chest rising and falling. But like I said, my words aren’t adequate. Sometimes words aren’t. To me, Schubert proved this better than any other composer.
When I was a kid, I used to go on summer vacations with my parents and my brother, and every year from the age of 10 and onwards – like many other vacation-bound kids I imagine – I would make a mixtape of music to bring on the trip so that I would have something to listen to, sitting in the backseat or late at night when falling asleep in a hotel room or a summer cabin somewhere in the world. Sometimes I would just copy an entire album I liked on to a tape, and sometimes I would pick out songs from lots of different albums and by many different artists and mix them together. But I always chose the songs or albums with great care, acutely aware that whatever music I picked would be – to my ears – affected by the impressions of the holiday, and would come to remind me about the holiday forever after. Below are the most important songs to me of each year between the years 1993 and 2001.
1993. “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base I was ten, and had been taught English in school for a year. This had tuned my ears to English-language pop music, and Ace of Base was all the rage for Danish tweens at that time, more melodic and sweeter-sounding than the eurodance that was in fashion. I brought a tape containing their entire album Happy Nation with me when my family went on holiday to the Danish island Bornholm that year. The album was a hand-me-down from my brother who had liked the group for a time, but quickly tired of it as I believe most people did who knew English well enough to see how bad the lyrics were. He rolled his eyes at me when I sat next to him in the car with my walkman, bopping my head to the music and smiling broadly. Bornholm is situated very close to Sweden, where the pop group was based, so in a way it was a site-specific album for me to bring on that holiday, although I never made that connection back then.
Years later, 11 years later to be exact, chance would have it that I was to work with the actress who played the Man Eater in the video. She was lovely and attractive, but sweet-natured and intelligent and not an cynical man eater in real life at all.
1994. “Fuld af nattens stjerner” by Sebastian
In the fifth grade, which I had just passed in the summer of 1994, I had become very interested in musical theatre after playing the princess, a singing role, in a school production of Aladdin. I also sang in a school choir that put up a musical every year, and somehow I had become convinced (mistakenly) that the production of the coming season would be a popular Danish musical version of Treasure Island, composed by a popular musician who went by the name of Sebastian. My family and I were visiting another Danish island, Ærø, that summer, and I ambitiously devoted my holiday to the studying of that musical. I had my heart set on the part of Mrs. Hawkins, Jim’s mother, who had the following solo:
Every chance I got during this vacation, I snuck away from my family so that I could unabashedly practise singing this song – I remember singing it to the waves on a beach facing the Baltic Sea on a grey, windy day when I was absolutely sure nobody would hear me. It’s kind of a lovely song, I suppose, even if the synthesizer sounds crummy.
The choir never did produce that musical, but I landed the lead in the production we did put up – a musical about Moses, so I guess my efforts weren’t a complete waste. This would also be the year that I landed a part as a child dancer in Tannhäuser at The Royal Theatre, thus developing the love of opera that has followed me since then.
1995. “If I Only Knew” by Tom Jones In 1995 my family went to Scotland. I was 12 and still mostly a happy, innocent child. An unpleasant incident that had taken place on a summer camp a few weeks earlier, however, had stirred something within me and still haunted me and made me uneasy.
What had happened was that I had met a boy, a bold-looking, redhaired, freckled boy, whom I thought to be flirting with me when once, at the beginning of the camp, he appeared leaning casually in a doorframe, looking me over and delivering some kind of pick-up line, the wording of which I have long forgotten. I was immediately charmed and during the next weeks of the summer camp, I made sure to smile at him whenever I had the chance, hoping to encourage him. Maybe he wanted to be my boyfriend, I thought. Maybe we would hold hands. He must have humored me a little for at least a while, but in the end he apparently got tired of the charade. I was walking through a hallway one hot, sunny afternoon when he came walking towards me – chance would have it that we were alone. I smiled at him as usual, but in return he suddenly quite roughly grabbed my upper arms and pushed me hard up against a wall. I hurt the back of my head. “How ugly you are,” he murmured at me, his face close to mine, his eyes angry and hard-looking, his hands squeezing my arms so as to almost leave bruises, “How skinny and disgusting. You’re so ugly. You look like a mouse.” I managed to free myself from his grab, and scurried away.
The experience had deeply unsettled me, and the violence of it kept coming back to me as I sat in the backseat, watching the landscape of the Highland rush by. Sadly, but typically, what I took away from it was not the conclusion that the boy was vile, a bully, an abuser, but rather that I had been foolish to think that he would ever be interested in me, that anyone would ever want me in that way, and that I should be ashamed of having felt for him the things I had.
Tom Jones’ “If I Only Knew”, however, seemed like a fun song to me, and provided a kind of haven from these thoughts. It treated the confusing adult sexuality that I was dimly becoming aware of with a humoristic, easy-going attitude that comforted me.
1996. “Why Does it Hurt So Bad” from the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack I swear I did not even like this song. But the confusion that I had vaguely felt the preceeding summer, had in the course of the seventh grade grown to become a full-blown chaos as puberty had hit me. We went to Wales that year, and the pictures of me from the trip show a person who looks more like a hobo than a young girl. My hair was stringy and too long, my clothes never matched, and when I smiled I revealed a mouth full of metal and strategically placed, small rubber bands, designed to fix my prominent overbite. I was so confused by everything that was happening to me that when it came for me to put together a mixtape, I just picked the only album I had on CD (I had only just gotten a CD player for my 13th birthday), which was the soundtrack from Waiting to Exhale, given to me by an aunt.
I had not even seen the movie.
I never listened to the song again after that holiday.
1997. “Jesus to a Child” by George Michael
People roll their eyes when one mentions this song – it really was played into the grave during 1996 and 1997. But it held a real significance to me during this particular summer.
I’ve sometimes looked back and wondered if I wasn’t suffering from an undiagnosed mild-to-moderate depression during this time. I felt terrible, permanently terrible. It didn’t come out of nowhere, it had been brought on by the diagnosis in late May that I had scoliosis and would have to wear a scoliosis brace until I had stopped growing. I was going to be hospilatized for a week in August when the treatment would start, and I spent the interim summer months in a kind of limbo of hopeless expectance and dull dread. For the first time in my life I felt that there was nothing to look forward to. Whatever I hoped to do after the summer would be marred by the thought of the brace, and I couldn’t even allow myself to long for the time when the treatment would be over, because nobody knew when that would be. Women grew to be tall on my father’s side of the family, while their growth stopped much sooner on my mother’s side of the family. There was a risk that I would be wearing the brace until I was 18, maybe even 20, maybe even older than that – my father’s mother had continued to grow even after she had given birth to her first child. And during all this time, I would be physically restrained, and I would be different. Stilted, not in my actual growth, but in the growth that makes young girls attractive.
My family went to South England, and then to a summer cabin by the sea in Northern Jutland, but I hardly remember any of what we saw. I had no use for reality and all its bleak prospects, so I withdrew from it. I was sulky and my family tried in vain to cheer me up. From inside the walls of my mind, I remember fantasizing vaguely about picking up some boy at my own age, perhaps a year older, and let him have his way with me behind one of the numerous dunes in the vicinity of the summer cabin, sandy, barren dunes, full of sharp, dry, yellow straws that would leave your fingers bleeding if you let them slip through your hands. This wasn’t a fantasy of physical pleasure or romance. I was so young that the idea of sex was still something scary, perilous, and unpleasant to me, anecdotes about blood and grotesque-looking body parts, grainy close-ups of stigmatizing sores and blisters in the books we studied in health class. The fantasy was a wish for selfdestruction, for self-ruin. Not quite like wanting to cut your own arms like the teenagers do these days, and not quite like wanting to pinch yourself in the arm to try to escape a bad dream. But something in between those two sentiments.
I had brought George Michael’s Older album with me, and I do recall getting some small kind of consolation out of “Jesus to a Child”. The minor key, the idea of a Christ-like comforting or redemption, and the sexually ambigious singer with his almost falsetto voice. It made me feel safe.
1998. “Many Rivers to Cross” My family went to Norway to go hiking, I was about to start high school.
I had taken a liking to Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” and included it on my mixtape, and I distinctly remember sitting in my parents’ car in Oslo on a summer evening, waiting for the ferry back to Copenhagen to dock, listening tothat song. The seat of the car pushed up the brace so that it dug into my ribs, my skin was hot and blistered under the massive plastic material from lack of ventilation in the summer heat, and I felt somewhat melancholy, but mostly I was hopeful, wondering what the future had in store for me. A month after our return to Copenhagen I was examined and it was concluded that I had stopped growing, taking after my petite mother after all, and the discontinuation of the treatment commenced.
1999. “To Emily Wherever I May Find Her” by Simon & Garfunkel In 1999 I had just discovered Simon & Garfunkel and thought they were great. Nowadays I’m mostly sick of them, but this is one song I still think is rather pretty.
We went to Paris and Alsace with that year. I was annoyed with the presence of my parents, (ungratefully ignoring the fact that they were paying for my trip), but I liked the mild evenings down by the Seine when we would all stroll and sip foreign, delicious beer. And I liked gliding through the pitoresque Alsace landscape, listening to my mixtape, which, absurdly, also included several tracks from Songs from Dawson’s Creek. Surely the darkest of dark horses in my CD collection.
2000. “Death of Queen Dagmar”. Traditional Danish ballad I was 17 and thus now certainly too old to be going away on holidays with my parents, but I was eager to go because the destination was Southern Jutland. In the past year I had abandoned my sulky, egocentric teenage self for good, and had started becoming genuinely interested in a number of different cultural phenomena, among these Danish medieval culture. And as chance would have it, Southern Jutland was one of the most important and prosperous part of Denmark during that era, and still the home of a number of interesting medieval landmarks and artifacts. For the trip, I had borrowed an album of choir versions of medieval Danish ballads to bring with me on this holiday, to create the right mood.
My favourite was “Death of Queen Dagmar”, a ballad describing the untimely demise of a popular Danish queen. Dagmar lived in the 12th century and died in childbirth, mourned by the entire country. The stanzas of the ballad take us through the final stages of her illness, her husband King Valdemar (also a highly popular monarch) receiving the news of her fragile state, his rushing to her side only to find her already dead, and her ghost’s brief return from the dead to bid Valdemar farewell and have him promise to do certain things after her death – making her son Kanute the heir to the throne (which Valdemar did) and refrain from marrying a lady named Bengard (which Valdemar went and did anyway) among other things.
It’s a beautiful ballad. I was delighted to find that the chimes of the dome of the Southern Jutland town of Ribe, which is mentioned in the ballad, play the melody every day at noon, in celebration of Queen Dagmar.
2001. “Det første møde” by Edvard Grieg We went to Norway again, in July. In late June I had been sitting in the auditory at my school, waiting to go up on the stage once my name was called. I remember reminding myself to straighten up and walk confidently and elegantly when I crossed the stage to receive my high school diploma from the principal. The erect, proud posture and the confident stride seemed to stay with me for the rest of that summer. I trotted through the Norwegian mountains with a pride and dignity that I had never had during my actual high school years. My limbs felt long, and strong, and supple.
My mixtapes that year included Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, because by that age the love of opera that I had harboured since Tannhäuser in 1995 had overtaken my taste in music almost completely, and I rarely listened to anything else. But in keeping with the summer before and the idea of bringing along site-specific music, I had also brought quite a lot of Grieg lieder, and I listened to them over and over and enjoyed them immensely. Feeling healthy and young as I did, and my dark hair brightened somewhat by the Northern sun, I felt connected to the strong, sturdy, nordic girls of the Grieg songs who loved and made love and lost and grieved. My favourite song was “Det første møde” – “the first [love] encounter”. It fascinated me how the melody was first straightforward and happy and in a major key, only to become mysterious-ringing, piano like a whispering, flirting with the minor key and hinting at something magical and strange and maybe even dangerous in the repetion of the stanza.
This was the last holiday I went on with my family, and my last summer mixtape. By the next summer I had moved out to live on my own.
I meant to post this for Mother’s Day yesterday, but got delayed. Here it is now – dedicated to my wonderful mother who deserves a gold medal for having put up with me when I was a perpetually screaming baby who refused to sleep, ever. She has continued to be incredibly patient with me during the following 28 years, and I am eternally grateful to her.
5. “Sov du dyreste guten min” (Solveig’s lullaby) by Edvard Grieg
A lovely, tranquil lullaby. The Norwegian lyrics describe a mother holding her sleepy baby boy:
“Sleep, my most precious boy
I shall cradle you, I shall watch over you
The boy has been in his mother’s arms
The two have played together for all the life-long day
The boy has slumbered by his mother’s breast
All of the life-long day. God bless you, my joy!
The boy has been lying so close to my heart
All of the life-long day. Now he is so tired.
Sleep, my most precious boy.
I shall cradle you, I shall watch over you
Sleep, sleep.”
The sunny, peaceful atmosphere of the song is contrasted by the dramatic context of the song: It actually isn’t sung by a mother to her sleepy infant song, but to Peer Gynt by Peer Gynt’s beloved and faithful Solveig, to whom Peer returns after having lived through a series of fantastic adventures and a close-call encounter with Satan himself. Peer Gynt is most likely dying while Solveig sings to him, although this is left ambigious by Henrik Ibsen in his original play.
4. “Mädel, mach’s Lädel zu!” from Wozzeck by Alban Berg
Perhaps one of the most unsettling lullabies ever, if it can even be categorized as a lullaby. Wozzeck’s wife Marie sings this song to her young son while admiring a piece of jewelry that her lover has given her:
“Girl, close the shutters
A gypsy lad is on the prowl
He will lead you off by the hand
To his far-off gypsy land”
The lullaby perfectly sums up the general feeling of fear and uncertainty that embues Büchner’s Woyzeck as well as Berg’s opera. This is exactly the kind of song haunted, doomed and just generally screwed-up Marie would sing to her (SPOILER ALERT!!1) soon-to-be orphaned son.
Also, it is an example of a 12-note aria that I actually know by heart. And by “an example of a”, I really mean “the only”. So.
3. “Sol deroppe” by Niels W. Gade / Peter Heise The lyrics for this one was a poem written by Hans Christian Andersen as part of a series of songs about Agnete and the Merman. I have to say that I generally think that Andersen was kind of a clumsy poet – he was much, much better as a writer of short stories and fairy tales, which was of course the genre eventually brought him international acclaim.
But this song is really very lovely. It’s a lullaby, written for the character of Agnete, who is singing to one of the seven sons that she has had with the merman. A mer-child, if you will, but I’m not going to go into any speculations as to whether or not such a child would have gills or grow up to develop insane fish mating rituals because that would just totally spoil the romance. But the lyrics are really lovely, and I like how they subtely hint at the fact that Agnete is not completely at peace with her life under the sea – when soothing her child, she painstakingly compares every under-water phenomenon surrounding her to the phenomena of the world she used to live in on the shore:
The sun up there is sinking
Sleep, my child, and grow big and strong!
You shall ride on the wild mer-horse
The meadow grows so prettily beneath the wave
The whales with their broad fins
hover over you like great clouds
The sun and the moon shine through the water
You shall have both of them in your dreams
Hush-a-by! I bore you in pain
Be my joy forever, year by year
You have drunk Life by my heart
to my heart each of your tears will flow
Sleep, my child, I am sitting by your crib
Let me kiss your eyes shut.
When one day my eyes are closed
Who will be your mother then?
Two different melodies exist for the song – one by Peter Heise and one by Niels W. Gade. I was unable to find an online recording of the song, but you can hear the Heise version here, and the Niels W. Gade version here. The gentle Heise melody works better as a lullaby, but the more sophisticaed version by Gade probably works better if sung as a lied, so I like them both.
2. “Dormi, amor mio” from Madame Butterfly by Puccini
I actually didn’t even think I liked Madame Butterfly until only last year. All that waiting…! And why would I even care about a painfully naive teenage girl and her asshat American faux husband? But then I saw it live in a theatre for the first time ever, and in a production that I really liked, and I was moved. I still think the main characters are absolute idiots, but I think that Puccini’s music more than makes up for this, beautiful as it is. My favourite part is the coro muto, but I also really like Cio-Cio San’s lullaby, sung to her aptly-named half-american toddler Sorrow:
Sweet, thou art sleeping,
Cradled on my heart;
Safe in God’s keeping,
While I must weep apart.
Around thy head the moonbeams dart:
Sleep, my beloved!
Just like the earthly imagery mixed with that of the sea in Agnete’s lullaby, Puccini mixes the harmonies of Japanese folk songs with what appears to be religious lyrics of the western world when singing to her Japanese-American little boy, with whom she must soon (SPOILER ALERT!!!!1!) part forever. It never fails to make me sniffle.
1. “Bow thy corolla, thou bloom”by Carl Nielsen
We have already seen, in the Grieg lullaby, how sleep and death can be closely interwoven in a cradle song, and I think this is an important point. Any mother who has ever checked on her sleeping baby to see if it’s still breathing will recognise the fear of losing her child, and I wonder if the baby, too, doesn’t on some level fear that it will perish while sleeping? I struggled with insomnia from infancy all through my childhood; a stubborn, insistant insomnia that didn’t go away until I was in my teens and got overpowered by that obligatory adolescent fatigue and laziness. I later found out that severe childhood insomnia is a common trait among children who, like myself, were suffering while inside their mother’s womb due to a difficult pregnancy. These children fear sleep because they are afraid of letting go – they feel certain that they will die if they do.
This is why I’m so fond of this particular lullaby, in which the lyrics hint at the image of not just the cradling of a weary child, but the soothing of a person who is dying. This tendency becomes especially clear in the third stanza which, in an almost startling manner, features the image of a slumbering child as a comparison rather than as a description. The mention of the night drawing near coupled with the encouragement to humble prayer, too, always struck me as ominous, and the melody lingers somewhere ambigiously between the minor and the major, with a crescendo rising in the fifth to eighth bar of each stanza. Eventually, however, it’s the feeling of soothing, the prospect of peaceful sleep, that takes over, and my inner fearful, tired little infant loves this.
I know that an English translation of the song exists, but I have been unable to find it, so here it is in my own direct translation:
Bow thy corolla, thou bloom
Let it descend into the leaves
Await with closed petals
The blissful peace of night
The night, mild and quiet,
is drawing near – oh, bow and pray
Sleep beneath golden stars
Sleep yourself blessed and sound
Sleep like a child that is rocked
Gently in its mother’s arms
Awaking only partly to sigh
with a smile its mother’s name.
It’s no secret that I’m not exactly as well-versed in the world of indie music as I’d like to be. Opera music – that’s my thing, and I’ve spent most of my time on this genre. But one indie artist I’ve always liked is Michael Møller. Møller got his big breakthrough with his band Moi Caprice – you may remember their song “When Artboy meets Artgirl“, which I still turn to whenever I feel disenchanted with this world, or the haunting “To the Lighthouse”:
As a solo artist, Michael Møller has now launched a fascinating new project: A Month of Unrequited Love. Møller himself describes his project in an unpretentious manner:
A Month of Unrequited Love is a collection of 31 songs, which will be released through this website during one month, starting May 1st. It’s an attempt to make a different musical unity on the internet. All songs deal with unrequited love. It’s not quite as depressing as it might sound. Some of it might be.
Every day through May 2011 a new song will be uploaded on this website. Every song is available for free download on the day of upload; after that it’s for streaming only. All 31 songs will be removed from the server shortly after the end of the project. After this they can be purchased through the iTunes store.
I’m enjoying the project immensely myself, both the songs and the great black-and-white photos by photographer Heide Kränzlein. The subject matter, the atmosphere amorous disillusion and the cycle-like format of the songs remind me somewhat of a modern version of Schubert’s Winterreise, and the lyrics totally made me choke up:
