Old Fogey’s Favourites

As a companion to my Going to Sleep anthology, here is one about waking up. Waking up from blissful dreams or from nightmares, from the repose of sleep to the cares of the world, to the sight of the beloved in whose arms you have rested, or into the cold light of day.

Here we start on a positive note. An English hymn, in the immensely popular version by Cat Stevens.

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In December 1956, following his tour of Europe, Louis Armstrong entered the recording studios and over a period of two months re-recorded (or rather re-created) some forty or so classics from throughout his career - from his days in Chicago with King Oliver in the early 20s, through his classic Hot Five period and into the 1930s when he reached the peak of his early fame. Now, though, he was a young man no longer; he was in his mid fifties. For some reason, this exercise of re-creating his early hits seems to have inspired him - to the extent that some of his re-creations equal, and even better, their originals. When these recordings came out as a boxed set of four LPs as his ‘Musical Autobiography’, they were hailed as classics of their kind - a new peak, in his long career. He introduced each track with a spoken reminiscence. For this track, That’s My Home, he pays touching tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton who played it for him as his departing train pulled out of the station, on his way home to America.

Louis wasn’t the man he was in his youth. His trumpet had no longer the breathtaking technique of thirty years earlier. Yet it has something else - a majesty and poise that only maturity brings. And that trumpet tone - the sound of a golden sunset.

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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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In my previous post I paid homage to Jacques Brel, a singer of intense power and sincerity. Here is another singer who grabs you by the lapels and won’t let you go. It is the Italian singer Battisti. This is his song - I Giardini in Marzo. It starts gently, elegiacally, where he remembers his mother, how she used to dress; how he was at school, yearning to be free; and the evening you called ….

Then the chorus. Here we float away from these memories; he asks what day and time it is and tells us that we must live now, in this time, fully. His hand trembles no more. In his soul the heavens have opened and here in his melancholy he sees everything filled with love. Courage returns.

Listen to how he sings it.

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Jacques Brel died thirty years ago this month, not yet 50 years old. Here in memory of that majestic talent is one of his gentlest songs - L’Enfance (Childhood). Brel was admirably unsentimental and even here, when you might expect some softening of feeling, he never lets us forget that childhood is a preparation for the sadness of being grown up.

‘Childhood - who can tell when it ends, when it begins. It is nothing, a rashness, all that cannot be written down……… Childhood - the right to dream and to dream still. My father once was a seeker of gold; care is what he found.’

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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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It’s autumn - and this is London. This week has been something of an indian summer, with sunny days and temperatures in the 60s. But that hasn’t halted the season’s march, and the first reds and golds are showing on the trees at the bottom of my garden. The horse chestnuts have all gone brown prematurely, on account of some bug that has got into them, but the conkers are still prolific. Walking down the avenue of chestnuts towards St Mary’s Church last week was hazardous - more than once falling conkers bounced off my bald head.

Still this isn’t really the place to be in autumn - or the Fall as Americans so poetically put it. It is over there. A place, I sadly confess, I have never been to. But here’s how in my dreams it would be - in New York. A young Frank Sinatra singing, in 1947, this wonderful Vernon Duke song.

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This song was written by the Irish singer, Sinead Lohan, and recorded by her on her album ‘No Mermaid’. She sings it there with her characteristic dreamy innocence and charm. Unfortunately the album is infected with the virus of an overactive producer who seems to have insisted on adding extraneous effects to the musical background and filtering the sound through a coke-lined sieve. For a few hearings this is exhilarating but thereafter starts to tire the ear. Here is the song sung straight, and very good it is. It is performed by the American country group, Nickel Creek.

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