{"id":3707,"date":"2012-05-13T06:47:20","date_gmt":"2012-05-13T11:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=3707"},"modified":"2012-05-13T06:47:20","modified_gmt":"2012-05-13T11:47:20","slug":"surprise-theres-not-a-lot-of-mother-in-secular-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2012\/05\/13\/surprise-theres-not-a-lot-of-mother-in-secular-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprise: There&#8217;s not a lot of mother in secular classical music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was rummaging through some Victorian music and found <em>M\u00e9lodie<\/em>, a little 1891 gem by pianist (and Poland&#8217;s first president) Ignacy Jan Paderewski. The attraction for me is how there&#8217;s something below the surface, including a counter melody scattered in the harmonic underpinnings.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s written in the slightly frustrating key of G-flat Major, and just doesn&#8217;t sound as fine if transposed to a simpler key.<\/p>\n<p>How appropriate for Mother&#8217;s Day, I thought &#8212; especially in this sweet performance by Stephen Hough:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VbQszka8vDc?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p><!--more-->Thinking about Mother&#8217;s Day made me realise that secular music by or about mothers is rare in the classical canon. A section of Brahms&#8217; <em>German Requiem<\/em> (which straddles sacred and secular) is all that came to mind.<\/p>\n<p>Update: A big thanks to Scott Belyea, who wrote in after he saw this post to suggest Josef Suk&#8217;s set of five pieces, <em>About Mother<\/em>, Op. 28.<\/p>\n<p>Here is Margaret Fingerhut playing the first one:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/aKlqMapXi3c?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>Here is another excellent suggestion from Elaine Fine, <em>Moderen<\/em>, O;. 41, written in 1920 by Carl Nielsen, and performed in this clip by\u00a0Gro Sandvik, flute, harpist\u00a0Turid Kniejski and\u00a0Lars Anders Tomter on viola:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4yWCTiJ9zRQ?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>Reader Advisory (to mimic the messages that precede TV shows), if you want to keep a sweet varnish on Mother&#8217;s Day, don&#8217;t read on.<\/p>\n<p>If we stretch the boundaries a bit, though, here is the scariest song I think it would be possible to find.<\/p>\n<p>With text by Berthold Brecht set to music by Hanns Eisler 70 years ago, &#8220;Lied einer deutschen Mutter&#8221; (Song of a German Mother) is a chilling confession from a mother who regrets having given her son a brown shirt and jackboots.<\/p>\n<p>If I had known then what I know now, she concludes, I would have seen that the shirt would become your shroud.<\/p>\n<p>Here is an appropriate performance of it by Gisela May, accompanied by Karlheinz Mehring:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2WmScgUGiE0?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p><em>John Terauds<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was rummaging through some Victorian music and found M\u00e9lodie, a little 1891 gem by pianist (and Poland&#8217;s first president) Ignacy Jan Paderewski. The attraction for me is how there&#8217;s something below the surface, including a counter melody scattered in the harmonic underpinnings. It&#8217;s written in the slightly frustrating key of G-flat Major, and just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36,37,47,56,66,70],"tags":[1424,1964,2185,2284,2553,3128],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-XN","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3707"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}