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Last year I was considering entering a Lieder-contest just for the fun of it (no, you can put the ear plugs away - I would have been the pianist, not the singer. )

My friend the Schubert baritone was busy and had other commitments, so I thought I might persuade another friend, a professionally-trained Polish soprano, to sing some songs by Chopin. I'm of Polish extraction too, and can speak the language well enough to carry on an intelligent conversation with my parents, so the original text would have been a walk in the park.

But then I read the competition rules and was stopped in my tracks by the following stipulation:

"All Lieder must be performed in the original German."

(No, there was no restriction on which composers' works could be performed. If we had chosen some songs by Dvorak (Czech) or Tchaikovsky (Russian), or chansons by Ravel or Faure (French), the rule was the same: all Lieder must be performed in the original German.)

(The contest was sponsored by a local organization that has as its aim the promotion of the German language and culture.)

Now, I'm a purist, and I insist on Schubert-Lieder being in German (the few times I have heard English or other translations have been truly painful to me), but telling a Polish person that Chopin-Lieder must be performed in the original German is like a red rag to a bull. (Never mind the historical circumstances that led to Chopin and others writing songs in Polish, namely, that Poland was under occupation by other nations, the use of the Polish language was banned and everybody was forced to speak German.)

I'm not one of those people who run around crying "don't mention the war" - I would never have grown to love Schubert-Lieder if I was - but the sad reality is that there are many people to this day that are sensitive to these kinds of issues (probably one reason I could never find anyone to perform Schubert-Lieder with me when I was a child growing up surrounded by Polish people. )

It is difficult enough to even GET a copy of the Chopin-Lieder in Polish. The CDSM version is in German. There is no way I was going to give that as a Mother's Day gift to my mother (enthusiastic self-taught Polish mezzo-soprano and lifelong fan of Dame Joan Sutherland). I had to order in a copy at great expense from Poland, and that order fell through because they were out of stock.

So there's my random gripe for the day. What are your thoughts? Where is the dividing line between a healthy pride in one's cultural heritage and an unhealthy nationalism? How can we use music to unite rather than divide people and nations?

(I must confess that this topic entered my head at the weekend after hearing a news report about Germany defeating Poland in a game of football - thanks to a goal from a Polish-born player on the German team )

Aldona

This is how I understand this matter.

The overall genre involved is "song," or "art song" in the classical field. The sub-genres of art song include division according to language.

"Lieder" are art songs in the German language, just as "chansons," "romances," or "mélodies" are in French, романсы or песни are in Russian, pieśni are in Polish, etc.

To give an example, César Cui composed 3 Lieder (Op. 37), 6 pieśni (1902), 6 mélodies (Op. 23), and, or course, many, many, many, many Russian songs as романсы, песни, and стихотворения ("poems").

However, a publisher or a cataloger might attach other designations. If the pieces are issued with a translation for singing, then there may be an added title reflecting that. Besides that, within a given language-group, the common term for "song" might be applied, even if there's no translation: the publisher may not be operating within the language-group of the original text or may be marketing to more than one language-group.

So, Cui's Op. 86 has the Russian title 25 стихотворения (publ. by Zimmerman). The edition also gives it a general German title "Lieder und Romanzen," probably because all the songs have a German text (whether an original poem or an added translation), despite the language of the original texts (Russian, French, German, Polish). In addition, giving the added German work-title presumably would improve sales as well.

I understand that the whole art-song genre came to be known collectively as "Lieder", probably partly because many of those who contributed to its development were German-speaking (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, et al) and partly because of the dominance of the German state in European politics at the time (meaning that many of these other nations would have been, if not under German rule, then at least under a strong German influence.)

The body which was supposed to be organizing the Lieder contest was actually the Lieder Society of Victoria (of which I am a member), which has as its first aim "To stimulate interest and activity in the Lied form and Art songs of all countries."

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~liedsoc/

They hold regular concerts and other events featuring art-songs of all nationalities and languages. The lieder contest is an annual event, and was not advertised or publicised as anything different to the above aim...it was not until I read the fine print (and also read that the Goethe Institute was one of the sponsors), that the "discrimination" became evident.

That is what bothered me at the time. If they had come right out in the open and declared that it was a "Deutsche Liederfest", or "A Celebration of German Cultural Heritage", complete with German flag and black eagle on the flyer, it would have been more honest and nobody would have minded, least of all me. If my friend the baritone has time, we may still enter next year and perform some Schubert.

But what annoyed me was the apparent change of focus...after being geared up to expect an event of cultural and musical diversity, all of a sudden it was not about the art song genre or the music, but about a particular language.

Aldona

aldona wrote:But what annoyed me was the apparent change of focus...after being geared up to expect an event of cultural and musical diversity, all of a sudden it was not about the art song genre or the music, but about a particular language.

Aldona

I would have been bothered by that as well. I am a firm believer in singing music in the original language is possible - it's nothing to do with nationalism, but I would find Chopin in German to be no better than Schubert in English. Sometimes, depending on the music and the skill of the translater, it can work, but usually the translations don't do justice to the original poetry and often don't even fit the music well.

The funny thing in that question of languages, is that very often, when hearing a melody sung in another laguage, it sounds very much different... Schubert sung in French doesn't sound like Schubert, even when it is done with the greatest art (i.e. Ch. Panzera), and some Italian arie if one doesn't know them particularly, could sound like Massenet or Gounod...

Of course, some composers did, like Wagner, write a complete translated version from a work into another language (Fliegende Holländer in French), but that is an other thing altogether...

After all, the vowels are just a question of "tone" (amount and equilibrium of the harmonics included in a sound), and changing the vowels in a song would be like changing a flute for a fiddle... and consonnant is like the different ways to attack and articulate a melody, so, changing them would be like changing slurs, articulations, staccati and so on in a melody...