Old Fogey’s Favourites

There are two famous versions of this song, from the 1930s. One from Al Bowlly, with Ray Noble’s Orchestra, and this one, from Bing Crosby. Crosby was still singing in his youthful manner, not yet the ‘Old Groaner’, and in the higher part of his voice. It was recorded in 1934. In the later thirties and into the forties his voice darkened and he sang more in the lower register, as a newer generation of popular singers, including, most notably Frank Sinatra, appeared and began to sing in a more breathy, close up and intimate style.

Bing’s singing is direct and clear, without affectation. In his own style, he was a master - and he made singing seem so easy. When we sing in the bath, we are trying to sing like him.

He also whistles.

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One of the most famous of all lullabies - Schubert’s ‘Wiegenlied’, written in 1816 after an anonymous poem.

‘Sleep in her lap, soft as down, as love’s pure notes echo still around you. After sleep, a lily, a rose, shall be yours.’

The singer is Irmgard Seefried.

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I heard this song when I was young, on an old 78rpm record. It haunted me for years. Yet it’s just a sentimental song from the early years of the twentieth century. The singer begs a loved one (we don’t know if it is lover, mother, friend) to sing her to sleep so that she can be at rest from the cares of the day. The singer is passive, almost helpless, at the end of her tether. Sleep is anaesthetic. Her love is for those who can give her the rest she craves - only “God and you” are true. At first hearing I find the song charming, but after more hearings I begin to find it strange and disturbing.

In Robert Guediguian’s film, La Ville est Tranquille (2001), about the urban underclass in Marseilles, a young woman lives with her mother and small baby in a flat in a down at heel part of town. She is a drug addict. Her mother works in a fish cannery to support herself and the child and her daughter’s heroin habit. The mother finds it increasingly hard to get enough money to buy drugs, and her daughter becomes restless, anguished and vicious. Finally after months of struggling with her daughter’s demands, she reaches the end of her tether. She prostitutes herself to get enough money and returns to the flat with heroin. The daughter’s look, when she realises what her mother has brought, is one of radiant love, as she anticipates the drugged bliss of the sleep to come. Her mother gives her an overdose and the sleep in permanent.

The singer is Essie Ackland. 

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This is one of two great settings (the other is Schubert’s) of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. He wrote it as a young man on a walking tour and inscribed it on the wall of a mountain hut where he slept the night. Then the words carried the sense of soft repose after a day of healthy exercise. Returning many years later as an old man, to look again on the words he had left there, they must have taken on quite another connotation.

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.

I heard this sung by Dame Margaret Price at a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on 1 February 1995. She sung it as an encore, in memory of Geoffrey Parsons, the great accompanist, who had died the previous week.

Here it is sung, most beautifully, by Christine Schafer, accompanied by Graham Johnson.

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The moment in this series on Sleep where sleep becomes the metaphor for death. This is nowhere explicit in the song itself, Henry Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’. The references are to the sun, its decaying light, and the soft bed whereon ‘my body I dispose’, and the offer of myself to the arms of God for His safekeeping in ’sweet security’. It is prayer. ‘Then to my rest. O my soul’.

Yet this is one of those heart-aching pieces that often is played at funerals, as if by some natural recognition that in all its words and its final offering of the soul to God at the end of the day it becomes a song of eternal rest and a plea for His perpetual light now, more than the sun, to shine upon us for ever more.

The singer is Emma Kirkby. I have heard this sung many times and no-one matches her.

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My second post on Sleep follows on from the lullaby theme of my last one. But here it is lullaby with menace. From a fairy story. And how terrified are we, as children, lost in our dreams of the fairy story, by the unknown threat of violation that lurks in the forest of sleep.

Englebert Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel und Gretel’ is a classic - but it frightens children as much as it charms their parents. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest, run away from home and the wrath of their parents after spilling the milk in the jar. Around them the forest closes in, in the dark of night. Fear surrounds them. They cling to each other till their eyes droop - and the Sandman arrives. To sprinkle sand in their eyes and usher in the darkness. And as if fearful of the unconsciousness of sleep they momentarily shake themselves out it and the Sandman’s spell - to pray. So they kneel, as the children they are, as if at the side of their bed (like once I did), and pray together for angels to come and guard them; two at their head, two at their feet.

The prayer saves them for the morning, when reality, and real terror, arrives.

This is Adelaide Wette as the Sandmann and Irmgard Seefried and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Hansel and Gretel. 

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This is the first in a series on the music of sleep. Sleep as rest, repose, comfort and relief - and too as that symbol of our last repose on earth, in death.

Let’s start with what comforts. The lullaby. Is there any other word in English more comforting that ‘lullaby’? That sense of being surrounded by love and sent, bye and bye, to sleep……. So even if we can’t remember the lullabies that were sung to us, we respond to them now as if we do - in that moment of heart’s ease that overcomes us as we listen.

Here’s one of the loveliest. It was originally thought to have been written by Mozart. But later was found to have been one of his pupil’s, Bernhard Flies - ‘Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf ein’. Here it is sung, in a version unmatched, by Rita Streich.

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“Schlafendes Jesuskind” is the most approachable of Hugo Wolf’s songs. It’s a settng of a Morike poem about the sleeping Christchild.

I came to Wolf late - not really getting to grips with his declamatory style. And the orchestral versions of some of his songs made approaching them easier for me. The first time I heard this song was at a concert in November 1981, where the songs were shared between John Shirley-Quirk and Elizabeth Connell, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Ferdinand Leitner.

Here is Elizabeth Connell singing “Schlafendes Jesuskind”. I love the way she floats the word “Himmelskind” at the end.

The song starts 20 seconds in, after audience rustling and settling.

Here are the words.

Schlafendes Jesuskind

Sohn der Jungfrau, Himmelskind! am Boden,

Auf dem Holz der Schmerzen eingeschlafen,

Das der fromme Meister, sinnvoll spielend,

Deinen leichten Träumen unterlegte;

Blume du, noch in der Knospe dämmernd

Eingehüllt die Herrlichkeit des Vaters!

O wer sehen könnte, welche Bilder

Hinter dieser Stirne, diesen schwarzen

Wimpern sich in sanftem Wechsel malen!

Sohn der Jungfrau, Himmelskind!

Sleeping Christchild

Son of the Virgin, child of Heaven, lying on the floor

asleep on the wood of suffering

that the pious painter has placed -

a meaningful allusion - under your light dreams;

You flower, even in the bud, darkling and sheathed,

still the glory of God the Father!

O, who could see,

behind this brow, these dark lashes,

what softly-changing pictures are being painted!

Son of the Virgin, child of Heaven!

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