Identify two lieder

November 9, 2012 6:40 PM

Could someone please identify these two lieder? I think they are German art songs. I can't even make out any phrase to use as a search term (so if you can, that would be great): one; two. Thanks in advance.
posted by amtho to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

That person's enunciation is horrendous, holy cow. The rolled r is ridiculously distracting.

That said, these aren't obscure songs; I know I've heard the, and I'm pretty sure I studied the first one, so I'll try to place them. it's hard without being able to make out the words, though!
posted by Sidhedevil at 7:00 PM on November 9, 2012

Yeah, I can't understand more than MAYBE a "mit Augen" and "ein Heim" in the second one.

My guess is perhaps Hugo Wolf? Let me pull out my lieder words. I didn't find it anywhere in my Schumann.
posted by Madamina at 7:23 PM on November 9, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for looking. The first song sounds familiar to me, too.

It's part of a sampling of songs by the same singer (an academic, FWIW) given to my by my teacher who-knows-when. The other songs in the set are a Bach cantata aria, three Hugo Wolf songs, a Schoenberg song, and a set of four songs by Luigi Dallapiccola.

So, more Wolf would be a stong possibility.
posted by amtho at 7:34 PM on November 9, 2012

Dang. I looked through my entire German section of The Ring Of Words and couldn't find anything that remotely fit.
posted by Madamina at 7:41 PM on November 9, 2012

The diction really surprises me. Is it possible it could be NOT German, like Norwegian (songs by Grieg)? It doesn't sound like Finnish to me (Sibelius).

Ooh... Dvorak?
posted by Madamina at 7:55 PM on November 9, 2012

Best answer: YES! That was it! No wonder the German diction was so awful -- it IS Norwegian *giggle*

Both songs are Grieg.
Song #1 is "Med en vandlilje" (With a Water Lily) - text by Ibsen.
Song #2 is "Våren" (Last Spring).
posted by Madamina at 8:05 PM on November 9, 2012 [7 favorites]

Yay, Madamina! Terrible Norwegian diction, too, though---she's rolling the r instead of rhotacizing it.

There's a great Flagstad performance (with MacArthur on piano) of the first song on YouTube.
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:16 PM on November 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you so much!
posted by amtho at 8:20 PM on November 9, 2012

The second track (The Last [or ultimate] Spring) is the most hauntingly elegiac melody I know - although it is far more commonly heard as an orchestral piece. I had a recording I was listening to regularly when I was a junior doctor in specialty training living 200 nautical miles away from my wife and (first) child. Still gives me the shivers. Grieg was a genius.
posted by kairab at 4:03 AM on November 10, 2012

The trilled 'r' is fairly common in classical and art singing even in languages which, when spoken, place the 'r' further back in the mouth or even throat. There are few resources available on Norwegian sung diction; here is a brief video about work in development including about half a minute of singing in which the professor lightly trills most if not all the 'r's.
posted by thatdawnperson at 6:06 AM on November 10, 2012

Yeah, spoken and sung diction are dramatically different. I took a semester of (combined) English and Italian diction followed by another on French and German, and overwhelmingly my teachers said that Enlish was the hardest -- in part because we take it for granted. We started with Italian because it was comparatively "pure" in its rules about what vowels sounded like in which situations, and we still spent a whole period on the Italian o.

Really, when you sing there's just no way to pronounce some sounds the same way you do when you speak. Rs are one of the nastiest examples in any language. The rule of thumb is often "just do the danged best you can."
posted by Madamina at 1:21 PM on November 12, 2012