Ukrainian stress

[Chew G]

Possibly this discussion is already boring many list members (though not me!), but I have been thinking all along of W. H. Auden's Notes on Opera, and feel that at least a short quotation from them is in order.  They certainly give some substance to the approach taken by Stravinsky in word-setting -- in "The Rake's Progress", to verse written by Auden, and elsewhere -- which is not quite according to Romantic conventions of song:
 
He writes (The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (London, 1963), pp. 465-474):

"If the librettist is a practicing poet, the most difficult problem, the place where he is most likely to go astray, is the composition of the verse. Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry. Here one should draw a distinction between lyric and song proper. A lyric is a poem intended to be chanted. In a chant the music is subordinate to the words which limit the range and tempo of the notes. In song, the notes must be free to be whatever they choose and the words must be able to do what they are told. 

"The verses of Ah non credea in La Sonnambula, though of little interest to read, do exactly what they should: suggest to Bellini one of the most beautiful melodies ever written and then leave him completely free to write it. The verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer. They have their moment of glory, the moment in which they suggest to him a certain melody; once that is over, they are as expendable as infantry to a Chinese general: they must efface themselves and cease to care what happens to them. 

"There have been several composers, Campion, Hugo Wolf, Benjamin Britten, for example, whose musical imagination has been stimulated by poetry of a high order. The question remains, however, whether the listener hears the sung words as words in a poem, or, as I am inclined to believe, only as sung syllables. A Cambridge psychologist, P. E. Vernon, once performed the experiment of having a Campion song sung with nonsense verses of equivalent syllabic value substituted for the original; only six per cent of his test audience noticed that something was wrong. It is precisely because I believe that, in listening to song (as distinct from chant), we hear, not words, but syllables, that I am not generally in favor of the performances of operas in translation. Wagner or Strauss in English sounds intolerable, and would still sound so if the poetic merits of the translation were greater than those of the original, because the new syllables have no apt relation to the pitch and tempo of the notes with which they are associated. The poetic value of the words may provoke a composer's imagination, but it is their syllabic values which determine the kind of vocal line he writes. In song, poetry is expendable, syllables are not."

Clearly, the mention of Gilbert and Sullivan raises different (though related) issues. I've never heard of translations of G&S into other languages: are there any?
 
Geoff
 
Geoffrey Chew
 Institute of Musicology, Masaryk University, Brno
 chewg at seznam.cz
 
 Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
 g.chew at rhul.ac.uk

________________________________

From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list on behalf of William Ryan
Sent: Tue 6.5.08 01:16
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Ukrainian stress



Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
... I have never doubted that bad poetry could be written. ;-) ...
---------------------------------------

I protest. W. S. Gilbert did not write bad poetry, he wrote good verse.
Ingenious, satirical, parodic and very memorable verse, and any verse
which is memorable must have something going for it. Most of the songs
in Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas are memorable, and the librettos
often superior, as verse, to the regrettable librettos in some serious
opera. As an example of their memorable quality let me disclose that
after the convivial reception at the AAASS meeting in Washington a year
or two back Hugh Olmsted and I sang with appropriate gestures an ad hoc
medley of G&S songs - from memory, of course, although his was better
than mine - in the vestibule of the Omni Shoreham Hotel to a very small
but mostly admiring audience. We were not thrown out.

I wonder if there is a Russian libretto for 'Iolanthe' (there is, I
believe, for 'The Mikado') - and if so how the false stresses were dealt
with.

The technicalities of matching words to music are, it seems to me, the
same whether the words are sublime poetry or the most contorted
translated libretto. There may indeed be a problem of matching poetry
and music - Gounod's Faust is thought regrettable by some - but the
problem which gave rise to this thread is not about music and poetry, an
aesthetic matter, so much as music and verse, and the relationship of
verse and the norms of a spoken language, a more technical matter. As
Charles Kingsley is supposed to have said to a woman asking his opinion
on her poems, 'Madam, there is poetry and there is verse; and verse is
divided into two kinds - good verse and bad verse. What you have here
shown me is not poetry; it is verse. It is not good verse; it is bad
verse.' And Kingsley was an expert - he wrote a lot of it.

Will Ryan


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