Plaisir d'amour

No. 303 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages, which can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast303

** UPDATE ** Shared on OperaLively on 13 Feb 2019.

=====================================================================

This week’s Blog and Podcast is an early Valentine’s Day montage of love-themed songs spanning 300 years – from lieder, to opera/stage to popular repertoires.

The opening piece, "Plaisir d'amour" (literally "The pleasure of love") takes its text from a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755–1794), which appears in his novel Célestine. The refrain probablty summarizes every love song ever written:

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment, chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.

(The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, the grief of love lasts a lifetime.)

The song was greatly successful in Martini's version; Hector Berlioz arranged it for orchestra in 1859 and it has been arranged and performed in various pop music settings. For instance, a version of the melody has been used in Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling In Love, from the soundtrack of his 1961 romantic comedy Blue Hawaii.

The one Elvis Presley song I retained on the podcast, his solo ballad Love Me Tender, is also from the 1956 film of the same name.

Hymne à l'amour is a signature Edith Piaf standard, which she first sang at the Cabaret Versailles in New York City on September 14, 1949. It was written to her lover and the love of her life, the French boxer, Marcel Cerdan. Tragically, on October 28, 1949, Cerdan was killed in a plane crash on his way from Paris to New York to come to see her. She recorded the song on May 2, 1950.

Crying is a ballad written by Roy Orbison and Joe Melson that was a hit for Roy Orbison in 1961. In 1987, Orbison rerecorded the song as a duet with k.d. lang. Their collaboration won the Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals – that is the version featured today.

The main work in the podcast, Dichterliebe, "A Poet's Love" (composed 1840), is the best-known song cycle of Robert Schumann. The texts for the 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo of Heinrich Heine, written 1822–23. Dichterliebe is a hothouse of nuanced responses to the delicate language of flowers, dreams and fairy-tales. Schumann adapts the words of the poems to his needs for the songs, sometimes repeating phrases and often rewording a line to supply the desired cadence. Dichterliebe is therefore an integral artistic work apart from the Lyrisches Intermezzo, though derived from it and inspired by it. Contrast in context, Schubert’s Die Liebe hat gelogen (”Love has lied”) the loss of love is as inevitable as death itself, a terrible shock and yet somehow expected as part of the sufferer’s life-sentence.

Interspersed in the montage are selections from opera and musical theatre – works by Gershwin, Verdi, Bizet, Offenbach, Rodgers and Kern.

Carole King’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman was a 1967 single originally released by "The Queen of Soul", Aretha Franklin. King later covered the song on her milestone album Tapestry, as have many other vocalists – including my good friend Steve Longmoor at a karaoke bar in Fort Wayne, Indiana (at my urging, as I recall). At the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors, Aretha Franklin performed the song to honor award-recipient Carole King. It is that version which concludes today’s podcast.

I think you will love this music too.