Showing posts with label Richard Wagner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Wagner. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Mel Tormé's "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling"

I just wrote about this in "The Four Winds and the Seven Seas," but Mel Tormé's "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling" also features Wagner's wedding march from Lohengrin (popularly known as "Here Comes the Bride") on - I think - celesta.  Here, when the "Say, mister parson, stand by" verse is repeated, it starts halfway through the first line, and variations on it continue through the next line: "'Cause I've got a feelin' I'm fallin'."  It's not directly stated in the lyrics, but that musical quotation indicates that the singer/speaker is thinking about marriage.

Mel Tormé's "The Four Winds and the Seven Seas"

I just started listening to the last disc in a four-disc set of Mel Tormé titled Jazz and Velvet.  I noticed that after the lines "We vowed and said someday we'd wed / In the church in the vale" in "The Four Winds and the Seven Seas," the first four notes of the "Here Comes the Bride" wedding march (from Wagner's Lohengrin) are played on what I think is a celesta.

Additionally, there's an-other hint of wedding accoutrements with the vale/veil homophone.  It actually took a bit of thinking before I sussed out the line.  It's "vale" as in "valley."

Monday, April 4, 2016

Wagner: Die Walküre

I've spent much of to-day listening to Wagner's Die Walküre.  This is only the second time I've listened to it, and I haven't really tried to understand the story yet, but I did notice a small thing about a particular phrase (mostly because I happened to glance at the title of the movement).

Near the beginning of Act 3, Scene 1, Brünnhild sings, "Schützt mich und helft in höchster Not!"  ("Protect me and help in most dire need!"):

(notation found here)

The word "höchster" here is what caught my interest.  Paired with "Not" ("need," "distress," &c.), it's most likely to be translated as "most dire" (as I've done above*), but in other contexts, "höchster" would be translated as "highest."  In the melody here, the first note to which "höchster" is sung is the highest in the phrase, which emphasizes that superlative and mirrors that alternate meaning.

---
*In double checking my translation with my German-English dictionary, I also found that "höchster" can be translated as "deepest" in some contexts, but considering that the note to which it's sung in this phrase is the highest, it would be something of a musical/lingual contradiction to translate it as such.