The song is by Ivor Gurney to a poem by the Elizabethan poet, John Fletcher. It’s partly in praise of sleep’s restorative powers, but also, and more disturbingly, about sleep as an escape from melancholy, as if into drugged bliss.
‘Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving/Lock me in delight awhile;/Let some pleasing dream beguile/All my fancies, that from thence/I may feel an influence,All my powers of care bereaving.
Tho’ but a shadow, but a sliding,/Let me know some little joy./We, that suffer long annoy,
Are contented with a thought/Thro’ an idle fancy wrought:/O let my joys have some abiding.’
It is sung, beautifully, by Janet Baker, with Martin Isepp at the piano. It is an early recording, from 1966, when she was in her early thirties and her voice fresh and youthful. The original LP was released in England on the Saga bargain budget label. I bought it for ten shillings. Saga made a lot of very interesting recordings at the time - including Janet Baker’s other classic, her first recording of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. The problem with Saga is that everything was done on a shoestring. They didn’t always get their recordings quite right - in an otherwise good recording you might hear a moment where the sound drops out, or the pitch wavers. And the quality of their vinyl pressings was awful - clicks and pops, and background hiss. I’m glad to say that this recording if from a recent CD re-release - the stereo separation is a bit eccentric.
And wonderful for all that.
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From Beth Nielsen Chapman, written after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, this is a song of hope - and fear. She places hope in God and his angels to care for her before she goes to sleep. Like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the wood, praying for angels to guard them, two at their head, two at their feet. There is fear here too, its undercurrent deep in the music, but in the last verse, when the piano shifts sideways into a new major chord, hope is there too.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep, the troubles of this world released. The promise of tomorrow keeps angels by my side.’
It’s simple, artless - and very moving.
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Leos Janacek was one of the most original of late nineteenth and early twentieth century composers. His music lies somewhat outside the conventional path of modern European music. It’s modernity, if that is the right word, comes not from his adherence to some overarching musical ideology, like that of Schoenberg, Webern or Boulez, but more out of his interest in the detailed and specific - the sounds of water, of birds, of speech - in accents and sounds rather than semantics - all of which are reflected in his work. Nor does he seem to have been interested in musical virtuosity, or instrumentalism for its own sake. All his music seems to draw on, and refers back to, a wider understanding of life than just music. I can’t think of anyone who has been quite like him - Oliver Messiaen is the closest and even he isn’t very close.
His collection of short piano pieces, ‘Along an Overgrown Path’, each with touching little titles (’Our Evenings’, ‘A blown away leaf’, ‘They chattered like swallows’) is full of an intense nostalgic longing for his childhood home in Moravia. It was also written in the shadow of the death, aged 20, of his daughter Olga, to whom he was deeply attached, and a deep vein of melancholy permeates them all.
The piece called ‘Goodnight’ is one of the most haunting. It starts with a little four note figure - crochet, two quavers, crochet - high up on the piano, sounding on two notes only. It’s like a distant bell sounding, or a call across a river. The figure is repeated throughout the four minutes or so of the piece, gradually and slowly moving downwards until, at the end it sounds in the bass. It’s as if it was subsiding through consciousness into sleep - and as the final four notes sound, perhaps into that final sleep into which Olga, at long last, subsided - leaving Janacek alone.
The pianist is Thomas Hlawatsch.
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I posted earlier Schumann’s lovely setting of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. Here, written a quarter of a century earlier, is Schubert’s. Schumann finds a poignant, personal sense of loss, as if in death, in this yearning for rest at the day’s end. Schubert’s understanding is universal, less personal. He invokes the peace we all can find, as the day, and life, closes, in nature and in God.
‘Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.’
The singer is Karl Erb, the greatest of all interpreters of Schubert’s songs.
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Those of you who are English and of a certain age will understand me instinctively when I mention ‘Singing Together’. It was a regular BBC broadcast for schools during the 1950s. Those of us brought up on it can, at the drop of a hat, sing word perfect such classic English folksongs as ‘The British Grenadiers’, ‘The Keel Row’, The Keeper Did A’Hunting Go’, ‘Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron’ and this one - ’Golden Slumbers’ - sung to us at Infant School in the early afternoon as we were got tucked up for our afternoon sleep - and the teachers’ tea break.
Here it is sung by the Cambridge Singers conducted by John Rutter.
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One of the most famous, and loveliest, of Richard Strauss’s songs. Here is the last verse.
‘Dream, dream, flower of my love, of the quiet, blessed night, when the flower of his love changed forever this world into a heaven for me.’
It is beautifully sung by Gundula Janovitz.
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Here is setting of Goethe’s short poem - the second with this title and one which Schubert also set early in his career - as an addition to my Going to Sleep anthology. It is the version by Hugo Wolf. Here are the words.
“You who are from heaven, who assuage all grief and suffering, and fill him who is doubly wretched, doubly with delight, ah! I am weary of striving! To what end is this pain and joy? Sweet peace, enter my heart.”
In the dissonant chords behind the vocal there is mental pain and anguish, from which the singer yearns for rest.
The singer is Mitsuko Shirai, accompanied by Hartmut Holl.
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The third of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is ‘Going to Sleep’. The allusion to death, strong in the fourth and final song, is absent here. It is the freedom of sleep that is yearned for, untrammeled by the cares of the day, where the spirit can enter the magic world of dreams.
‘The day has wearied me, and now I long to be enfolded in the starry night like a tired child. Hands, leave off your work; brow, forget your thoughts. All my senses long to lose themselves in slumber. And my soul, on freed wings, yearns to soar at its will so to live a thousandfold more intensely under the magic arc of the night.’
It is sung here by Jessye Norman. In an earlier post I wrote about her interpretation of these last songs of Richard Strauss. This is what I said about her singing of this third song. ‘In…..“Beim Schlafengehen” there is a quite magical passage where, after the lovely violin interlude, she follows the line of the melody in almost imperceptible gradations, starting pianissimo then drawing her voice out into a crescendo, then retreating into head voice before building up the crescendo.’ It is unsurpassed.
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This marvelous aria is from some incidental music Handel composed for a play, Alceste, that never saw the light of day. There’s nothing sinister in this song. A lover celebrates the end of a joyful day, and looks forward to the morrow when her lover, after the ‘balmy dew of sleep’, then ‘may retaste the healthful day.’
‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night, hither speed thy airy flight! and his weary senses steep in the balmy dew of sleep. That when bright Aurora’s beams glad the world with golden streams, he, like Phoebus, blithe and gay, may retaste the healthful day.’
It is perfectly sung by Emma Kirkby.
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I am offering this as part of my ‘Going to Sleep’ anthology and as a supplement to my earlier post in tribute to the late Bernadette Greevy. Here she is singing the most famous of all lullabies. It is simply and beautifully done.
The pianist is Paul Hamburger.
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