Nabucco

My choir's latest virtual rehearsal was based on what is known in England as "The chorus of the Hebrew slaves" (so much better as the Coro di Schiavi Ebrei, as our copy had it...

<TYPO status="dubious" reason="old language?">
I think, though my knowledge of Italian is based on a course I did in 1992. the modern Italian would have degli in place of di. This would be yet another example of archaism in the 19th century text, like those I noted here

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...? 

<stop-press date="June 2020">
Yes he did – the splendidly named Temistocle Solera
</stop-press >

...) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

...

The ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. 

<background>
Earlier in the same post I had written:

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks 'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'.

<stop-press date="2020"> 

Catalan is like Castilian in its preference for derivation from UNDE, but without the pleonastic d: it uses plain on. So, far from adding a d at the beginning of the word, it drops one from the end.)
</stop-press>

And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr. chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa  – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). 

</background>

As Metternich...

<parenthesis>
"needs citation", to use Wikipedia's passive-aggressive  gibe, but my history teacher used to say it, and what's good enough for Mr Crosby is good enough for me
</parenthesis>

...said at the time 'Italy is a geographical expression'. The name VERDI was a coded feature of political graffiti, standing for Vittorio Emanuele Rei D'Italia. (And, now I think of it, the Hebrew Slaves have an allegorical relevance: the people of that geographical expression had been "enslaved" for centuries by various imperial powers.)
</TYPO>

Covid Chronicles 

The rehearsal (like most things these days: I wonder what's happened to the share price) was done over Zoom. For my madrigals group I use a tablet, which can put  nine thumbnails on one screen; it's a small group, so two screens is the most it runs to. But with the choir – with more than forty (60 or 70 on a good day) – I prefer to revert to my desktop PC, which runs to 2/3 screensful.

But it has no integrated camera. I've found a very old webcam, which I can't get to work. The PC itself is old enough (it runs Windows 7, no longer supported by Microsoft [and this old post sums up  my feelings about computer support:

She...[MrsK] asked a passing school-leaver [in PC World] if there were any known support issues with application software (I'm paraphrasing here, you understand) and the answer was, surprisingly enough, that everything was hotsy-totsy with Windows 8. 

Well, twenty years of working with software engineers (actually, 19¾ – HP took the penny-pinching precaution of shafting me 3 months before they would have had to fork out for a 20-year award) has taught me that if anything can go wrong with new software it will. This was true of Windows 95, and with everything since. Working in 'Support', which I did for many years, involved me almost daily in fixes and workarounds and you-just-can't-do-that-any-more when people tried to get existing application software to play nice with a new operating system.

]), but the webcam pre-dates even that – the user guide doesn't mention Windows 7 (only its predecessors Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

So my participation in the rehearsals is haunted by a photo of me (taken, now I think of it, when I was using Windows XP). The picture is in a file called mugshot.bmp, which gives an idea of its lugubriousness.

Tha'sall. Time I showed my face in the Real World.

b

Cultural metaphor

Earlier this week, on the first of Robert McCrum's Shakespeare and the American Dream  (well worth a listen), the presenter allowed through a reference that didn't work, at first sight (hmm... on first hearing), on radio but was repaired by the context (eventually). But I didn't need that contextual clue, as I know Robert. He was interviewing James Shapiro about the importance of Shakespeare to the USA, and Shapiro described a temporary army posting in the 1840s, where to  maintain morale in a hole (I think that was the word Shapiro used) ...

<digression>
in Corpus Christi, Texas (which shares its name, coincidentally, with the place where I met (and was directed by in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland) the aforementioned interviewer
 </digression>

... the army diverted themselves by putting on a production of Othello (a fairly bold choice, in Texas at  that time). The original casting of the soldier playing Desdemona was obviously ridiculous, said Shapiro. "He was your size – too big to play Desdemona." The replacement for the part was a young Ulysses S. Grant.

Viva Verdi

I made a note of this, meaning at some stage to write about this sort of cultural metaphor, but the only other example that came to mind at the time was Verdi's Nabucco, with its Hebrew Slaves chafing at their subjugation  – famously echoing the feeling of the Italian peoples (there being no country of that name at the time, except when used as "a geographical expression"  [Metternich, I think: Wikipedia would know]). Instead of Va pensiero sull' alle dorati (that chorus) the Italian nationalists could proclaim Viva VERDI (privately [and subversively] knowing that the composer's name was an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele, Rei D' Italia). (This is covered in the English Wikipedia entry for the composer; but in the Italian version there is a whole article (admittedly not a  long one) dedicated just to this phrase: Viva Verdi.)

But the very next day, on Midweek, I heard Daniel Evans talking about how his work on The Full Monty in Sheffield (losing its steel-based industries with associated unemployment and social disruption) was  redolent of what happened to the Rhondda when he was a boy. His latest venture, Showboat is itself a piece that opened people's eyes to an issue that at the time (of its first performance) was not discussed in polite society. And it went straight for the jugular, in the first word. It's a word that is one of the last taboos, timorously hiding behind its initial. In later versions it was attenuated (to "Darkies all work on the Mississippi" I think) and when Francis Albert covered it he sang "HERE we all work...". Oscar Hammerstein, someone mentioned on this morning's programme, was using Showboat to investigate his own feelings about racial tensions and miscegenation.

I seem to remember, from background information picked up during my A-level exposure to L'Etranger, that Camus'  La Peste was really about Vichy France, the body politic being infected by Nazism. In fact it's generally true that opposition to repressive/totalitarian regimes is not infrequently expressed through works of art that use this sort of cultural metaphor. And the more I think about it the more examples spring to mind. But it's late and I must get this Out There while it's still hot (and before I think of any more).

b
PS Here are a couple more clues:

Six-footers and over involving last of many quantity surveyors (8)

Rival bench in turmoil following leader of opposition's sign of peace. (5,6)



Update 2016.04.22.16:45 – Added PPS:

PS A striking part of the McCrum programme was the statement that American  readers regarded Shakespeare as belonging in some way to them, whereas over here we think he's ours  – though I should tread carefully here, given these Blogger stats for visits to this blog: the lower extract shows all-time visits, and the one on the right shows visits in the last month – suggesting a pretty constant 3:1 bias:

This is a point that David Crystal makes in his Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation:

The forms of English spoken around the world often include traces of regional and/or dialectal morphology, phonology, lexis – all that good stuff – of the British-born speakers who emigrated hundreds of years ago.  As the note to that Crystal extract says:

This PPS has been for the most part a digression, so I'll wrench it back to my main point (about cultural  metaphors). It's not just Othello and race that is particularly relevant in the USA. Internecine conflict (that's Civil War in Newspeak) make all the "Wars of the Roses" plays apt. Besides, we are talking about  myriad-minded man (Coleridge I think, but showing off his Greek) so all Shakespeare's output is relevant. But OP makes it more so.

Update 2016.04.23.15:30 – Shakespearean PPPS

PPPS It is ironic that an article in today's Times, dealing with misattribution conspiracies, participated – in an off-hand and unknowing way – in a related misattribution. A caption to two pictures of people who've had Shakespeare's works attributed to them referred to THAT portrait of "Marlowe" (cropped so as to hide the writing that points the finger of blame).

The Pseudo-Marlowe portrait: 
a wish fulfilled

In an article with that title , published posthumously in The Letter (published annually by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge – No. 93) the late Professor Oliver Rackham wrote:

I'm tempted to observe, in the words of some Elizabethan hack

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

Update 2016.11.22.14:05 –  Added PPS

PPS Answers: TALLYMEN; OLIVE BRANCH

Tonic sulphur

Today's  area of interest is stress,  which I've looked at several times already – here and here, for example, but the word cloud in the right margin will guide you to others. This time, though I want to look in particular at stress as it relates to tone.

When a linguist hears the word tone they automatically think of Chinese (or, if they have some background in more exotic languages, some other language that uses tones to make semantic distinctions). I (like most Eurocentric linguists, I imagine) think of Mandarin Chinese, because that's the most widely-spoken tonal language.

And I imagine everyone who learns to cite Mandarin Chinese as a tonal language also learns the same word as an example (four words, actually): ma. There are many MANY others though.  I learnt ma, but I was not surprised to see that Wikipedia used it as well. It‘s certainly worth a visit to the original, as it has an accompanying audio example; that‘s what I call "exempli gratia".

The four different MAs mean four different things: mother, hemp, horse and scold, respectively.

As that article says,

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words.^[1] All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages...

I suspect, as the order of the tone/meaning relations is the same, that Wikipedia‘s source for this example was this. But maybe I'm doing them an injustice; the voices in the two examples are different, and there might for all I know be some technical or just traditional reason for observing that order.

Anyway, that's not the sort of tone that concerns me here.  In discussions of stress, it's common to use the word tonic to refer to the stressed syllable, and a family of related words – atonic, oxytone, paroxytone.... Etymologically, these all refer back to the Greek τονος:

..."vocal pitch, raising of voice, accent, key in music," originally "a stretching, tightening, taut string," related to teinein "to stretch" (see tenet)

Arma virumque cano. CANO  ("I sing)".  I remember coming across a speculation once about what the diacritics in Homer signify: just stress, just tone (musical pitch, frequency), a mixture of the two...? It may have been in one of the first books I edited  – The Greeks and Their Heritages, published very posthumously as Arnold J. Toynbee died 6 years before it was published; so unless he was writing it on his deathbed the typescript had been knocking around at OUP for longer than that, waiting for someone to get stuck in.

<autobiographical_note>
In  the one and only (nope, make that two and only. although the technique was the same the second time around) seminar I led, I marked up my script with "diacritics" as a guide to ensure my meaning got across.
</autobiographical_note>

There is, in Spanish, a usefully self-referential word for a proparoxytone (as I'm afraid linguists call a word stressed on the last syllable but two  –  or, to use another $10 word antepenult. The word is  esdrújula; and esdrújula itself is an example, geddit? – so it's a lot easier to remember than proparoxytone. So is proparoxytone of course;  but so also is paroxytone, and so is oxytone, which spoils the party rather.

So I'll stick with esdrújula. Esdrújulas cause problems in language transmission (to a learner, that is). In languages that are predominantly, as regards words of more than one syllable,  paroxytonic (dah-dee) there is a tendency for the esdrújula stress pattern to be ironed out.

Take, for example, the esdrújula (Latin) word cathedra, which referred originally to a sort of chair (the sort a bishop sits on – we still refer to a bishop's seat [and in Portuguese a cathedral  is uma sé]. When the Pope makes an important  pronouncement, he delivers it from the papal chair – ex cathedra. But this is commonly rendered mis-stressed as ex cathedra. The choir of that name is often (almost always, on Classic FM) referred to in that way. In fact, they may have taken the pragmatic decision to go with the flow – as did Vladimir Horovitz in another case of mispronunciation.

<digression theme="Horovitz">
Until he started performing in the West the legendary pianist kept his native initial /g/^PS – written "H" in Cyrillic script. But, when Western agents and promoters started pronouncing his name with an /h/, he effectively changed his name.

<meta_digression>  

I suspect Einaudi may have taken a similar course; this needs further attention.

</meta_digression>

 </digression>

Ex machina is another esdrújula often mistreated (ex machina), and  – a frequently suffered trial  in the life of a choir member  – Carmina Burana (Carmina).

<rantette>
And another thing, while I'm on the subject. That tenor/conductor's name is Plácido  Domingo ("peaceful Sunday" [what I'm hoping for now the grass is all mown]) – that's why the accent's there. Think of the English "placid". It isn't the (metrical) twin of "placebo".
<rantette>

Underlay, the relation between notes and words (mentioned here), is often a guide (when the composer speaks the language). Here are two examples from a piece I'm singing in June:

Ove_olezzano tepide_e molli

That Verdi bloke would've absolutely aced  his Grade V Theory (setting a text): the stressed syllables, including two esdrújulas , fall on the stressed beats in the bar. In fact, if Verdi had written it – boringly  (he didn't) – in ¾ time, they would each have fallen on the first beat of a new bar. And in that uninteresting ¾ version, although both the te- and the pi- of tepide start a new bar, it's clear that te- is the more stressed syllable because its note is longer and pitched higher.

But any more on this topic will have to wait. I'm outta here.

b

PS A clue:

Adverse camber, a cause for apprehension? (6)

Update: 2016.04.29.15:20 – Explanatory typo fix in blue parens [sorry about that – took me a while to work out what I meant], and added PPS:

PPS On the subject of stress and tone, another song we're singing in our forthcoming concert is It ain't necessarily so – which includes the words "He made his home in that fish's abdomen". The underlay forces stress on the second syllable, which – on a first hearing many years ago – I put down to American English. But many dictionaries give both (though always, in my experience, with abdomen having pride of place). I had previously assumed that the British English stress was the one given unequivocally in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

No option given there,  whichever side of the Pond you're on.

But I'm regularly struck by my Tai Chi teacher's (her mother tongue not being English) pronunciation of "abdomen". And I think I may have found a clue (though not an explanation). Various editions of, for example, the Free Dictionary have foreign voices carefully pronouncing examples with all vowels given their canonical sound (as though stressed): the Netherlands one gives clear stress to the second syllable; these two are less clear, as both vowels are as if stressed – French and Spanish. But it seems as though languages with the same spelling for the word abdomen don't change their stress when they speak English*, so end up with the abdomen stress, as given in the English Language Free Dictionary audio example.

Hmm... But time's a-wasting.

b

And here are a  couple more clues;

Be present, finally – about time! (6)

Parrot, that is, instead of a clown. (7)

And time's up on the first one (set nearly three weeks ago): MACABRE

Update 2016.05.16.10:40 – Added footnote:

* Come to think  of it, you can bet your life that Moishe and Rose Gershovitz's native language had stress on the -do-, so naturally their son Ira pronounced it that way.

 Update 2016.11.22.14:00 – Added PS

PS The answer to the second clue: PIERROT. Sorry, the first (of the last two) has me beat :-)

Update 2017.04.13.23:15 – Added PPS

PPS: ¡En fin! The answer I couldn't fathom has come to me: ATTEND.
 

Update 2017.05.07.15:30– Added PPPS/footnote

^PPPS This is rubbish, though nearly right in a sort of way. I got letters and phonemes the wrong way round (the info had been dormant since 1982 [when I was editing a book on Horowitz]). The sound is [x] and the Cyrillic is G. He didn't change his name, but he changed his spelling to stop (non-Russian) people calling him Gorovitz. I had been worrying about this for some time, but a Russian interviewee on the news this morning, saying the Eurovision Song Contest was a modern-day "Sodom and Χomorrah" alerted me to the error.

Faithful or attractive, take 2

"Since some time I have begun an oratorio [BK – Elijah], and hope I shall be able to bring it out for the first time at your Festival..." 

Mendelssohn to the organizers of Birmingham Music Festival, 24 July 1845

'Since some time'? 'Bring it out'? Mendelssohn was an imperfect  speaker of English, though his English was a lot better than my German  (which, as I have said before, was Best Before End November 1969), and Elijah appeared first in English; all his correspondence with the Festival organizers and with his English publishers was conducted in English.

F.G Edwards, in his History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' wrote:

The music of "Elijah" was composed to German words; an English version was therefore necessary. Mendelssohn had no hesitation in assigning the task of making the English translation to Mr. Bartholomew—"the translator par excellence," as he called him—who is so well known as the translator or adaptor of Mendelssohn's "Athalie," "Antigone," "Œdipus," "Lauda Sion," "Walpurgis Night," the Finale to "Loreley," "Christus," and many of his songs and part-songs.

According to Edwards,

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) 

 

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) was "a man of many accomplishments—chemist, violin player, and excellent flower painter." In 1841 he submitted to Mendelssohn the libretto of a fairy opera, entitled "Christmas Night's Dream"; and in this way an acquaintance commenced which developed into a(49) close friendship between the two men—a friendship severed only by death.

Perhaps Mendelssohn's estimate of Bartholomew's excellence as a translator could be questioned. Perhaps Mendelssohn just meant that he was biddable, and ready to offer dubious and/or risible versions of the German texts as long as they approximated to the rhythms and sounds of the original. Here are some bits of the German, with Bartholomew's English text (I admit I was tempted to add some derisive quotation marks to that English); in the event I have just coloured offending^‡ versions in red.

verbig dich am Bache Crith

   =(?) thither^† hide thee by Cherith's brook

so ziehet hin, greifet ihn, tötet ihn!

    =(?) So go ye forth; seize on him! He shall die!

Wir haben es gehört  

    =(?) We heard it with our ears

noch sind übrig geblieben siebentausend in Israel, die sich nich gebeugt vor Baal

    =(?) for the Lord hath yet left Him seven thousand in Israel, knees that have not bowed to Baal

That last one is hard to deliver without laughing. At a first reading, I thought the seven thousand knees were just an encouraging spin on the notion of only 3,500 faithful. But look at the German: 'siebentausend..., die sich nicht...'  The die are the 7,000 faithful. The 'knees' are a figment of Bartholomew's imagination [and the resultant chaotic syntax is his fault].

But I don't underestimate the difficulties of verse translation; I'm a one-time practitioner, as mentioned here. And I'm not suggesting the wholesale revision of dated works; I pointed out here, for example, that in The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves Verdi set the archaic word Ove where modern Italian would have Dove; archaisms come with classic works of art. I'm just saying that the publishers of the next edition might usefully spend some money on a less unreliable English version; after all, they must have recouped the £250 [+ £100 ex gratia to Mendelssohn's widow] they paid for the copyright.

(I shouldn't have to add, but perhaps I'd better, that this doesn't make Elijah any less exciting to sing or listen to. I'm looking forward greatly to singing it with my choir next month. )

^†This is a puerile attempt at sounding archaic. Thither doesn't just mean there; it didn't in 1846 and it still doesn't.

b

Update 2015.10.14.16:20 – Added clarifications in maroon.

Update 2015.10.15.15:25 – Umble [sic] pie eaten.

^‡I have wronged Bartholomew. He was presumably influenced by biblical translations (not always the ones relevant to the Elijah story). Of the four lapses I identified, three are explicable:

1. seize on
   This is used only once in the King James Bible (which I'm assuming is the one Bartholomew was conversant with), and in the New Testament. But a biblical snippet like this would naturally have come to mind when Bartholomew was looking for words to match the rhythm of the German.
2. we heard it with our ears^§
   Again, this isn't taken directly from the Bible text, but it's strongly reminiscent of this:
   Then spake the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.
   [Jer. 26:11] 
3. knees
   This is not in the German text in the Novello edition, but it is in the King James Bible, almost verbatim:
   Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal
   [1 Kgs 19:18]
   And it is also in the Lutheran bible that Schübring based his libretto on:
   Und ich will übriglassen siebentausend in Israel: alle Kniee, die sich nicht gebeugt haben vor Baal
   more
   In the KJV text, I think the all the makes it sound slightly less silly. But it's a fair cop:
   Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. 

Update 2015.10.19.15:15 – Final obsessive? shaft – added this footnote:

^§ In an afterthought added to item 3  in this list of dubieties

<digression>
...I almost wrote infelicities – which would have been pleasing [in view of the composer's given name  – geddit, b-boum/tsh] but perhaps a little excessive. Besides, I rarely pass up the chance to use a word as luscious as dubiety ...
</digression>

...I cited the Lutheran Bible's Kniee (which I had previously said was 'a figment of Bartholomew's imagination'). The associated syntax, I had said, was 'his fault'.

Well, in a sense, it WAS. I was put onto the track of this line of enquiry by this extract from the Lutheran Bible (of the extract from The Book of Jeremiah, which I gave as precedent for '[we] heard it with our ears'):

Und die Priester und Propheten sprachen vor den Fürsten und allem Volk: Dieser ist des Todes schuldig; denn er hat geweissagt wider diese Stadt, wie ihr mit euren Ohren gehört habt.
More

Again, the bit of text that I had found questionable was in the Lutheran Bible [as far as I can tell from the only Lutheran text that I have found on the Internet – which can't have been the one Schubring knew [unless he had a DeLorean in the garage], but was not in Schubring's German text. Possibly (I think probably would not be an overstatement) there are many other bits of Bartholomew's translations that reinstate bits of Biblical text which Schubring had suppressed – presumably with Mendelssohn's approval (as their correspondence is quite detailed).

Bartholomew had a low opinion of the original librettist. On 23 June 1846 he wrote to Mendelssohn:

...I know not how so bad a scribe as he who penned the libretto could have been found;  words, nay even sentences were omitted... 

(Quotations from this and other correspondence are taken from F.G Edwards'  History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' )

Poor Mendelssohn! Only months before (just before Christmas 1845) he had written at length to Schubring:

My dear Schubring,—I now send you, according to your permission, the text of 'Elijah,' so far as it goes. I do beg of you to give me your best assistance, and return it soon with plenty of notes in the margin (I mean Scriptural passages, etc.)... 

...Speaking is a very different thing from writing. The few minutes I lately passed with you and yours were more enlivening and cheering than ever so many letters.—Ever your
Felix

Bartholomew's 'so bad a scribe' must have tried Mendelssohn's loyalty.

For the revised version, Bartholomew seems to have largely had his way, with Mendelssohn struggling (successfully, in the case of the 'couch-watering' widow) against Bartholomew's scriptural conservatism. On 3 March 1847 he wrote to Bartholomew:

My dear Sir,—I have just received your letter of the 24th, and hasten to reply. I like all the passages of the translation you send me with but two exceptions. In No. 30, 'that Thou would'st please destroy me' sounds so odd to me—is it scriptural? If it is, I have no objection, but if not, pray substitute something else. And then in the new No. 8 [the widow scene]—the words from Psalm vi. which you hesitated to adopt are, of course, out of the question; but I also object to the second part of the sentence which you propose to add to the words of Psalm xxxviii. {6}, viz.: 'I water my couch,' etc. [Psalm vi., 6.]—I do dislike this so very much, and it is so poetical in the German version. So if you could substitute something in which no 'watering of the couch' occurred, but which gave the idea of the tears, of the night, of all that in its purity. Pray try!

But enough of this. I should redirect my energy into LEARNING THE NOTES.

Update 2015.11.22.12:25 – Added post-choral PS

PS One last reflection on Bartholomew: How long was the drought?

I don't have the text in front of me (as after the concert last night –  the fullest I've ever seen the Great Hall, and the first time I've ever heard such an enthusiastic ovation [deserved, especially by a brilliantly electrifying Elijah] – I returned my hired score), but Google tells me the German text, as originally set, in the passage where Elijah decides to go to Ahab, is Heute, im dritten Jahre, will ich mich dem Könige zeigen..., The original curse, mentioned in the opening bars, is these years there shall not be dew nor rain but according to my word – that is, it was up to Jehova when the water supply was to be reconnected. The baritone tune (in this later section, N^o 10) mirrors the opening curse, and the 'these' of the opening bars becomes 'three'.

This belief is no doubt partly due to that dritte. A simple textual translation of those German words would be "Today, in the third year, I will show the king..." But Bartholomew's extraordinary translation makes it oddly specific: 'Three years this day fulfilled, I will show myself unto Ahab..." Oddly specific and improbably, if you think about it; if it stops raining in, say March, it's not going to start again at precisely the same time of year; that'd be a MIRACLE. And Bartholomew has also mangled the sense in another way. Heute ... will ich zeigen...; it just happens to be im dritten Jahre [="in the third year"], not "precisely, to the day, at the end of the third year" [or as Elijah puts it in Bartholomew's text "three years this day fulfilled"].

I'm forced to the conclusion that the only way to be true to Mendelssohn's intentions would be to sing the German – not a welcome suggestion among singers who look forward, every few years, to singing words like "extirpate". 

Update 2015.11.23.15:40 – Added clarification in green.

Update 2015.12.05.23:30 – Added PPS

PPS: One last thing. Elsewhere I wrote this:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes).

I quoted from a couple of pieces (with a pretty interesting reflection on the way Fauré plays with his audience's expectations, TISIAS) , and was aware at the time that this tally needed adding to. I've just noticed one in Elijah, and though that post seems the obvious place to put it I think that would be an update too far –  it would be the fifth PS.

Earth-Heaven = 1 octave
(Excerpt from Elijah)

When in  the second half of the oratorio, Elijah is taken up bodily into Heaven (none of this rotting business – so common) the music steps up an octave, starting with the basses on E♭.

And Mendelssohn repeats the scale, and then gives both extremes to underline the point.



Update 2015.12.06.11:30 – Improved music snippet, updated footer and added this crossword clue:

Mine sea cow – sounds like our kind. (8)

Update 2021.01.15.11:30 –  Deleted old footer; and  tried to dredge up the answer to that clue after six years. My knee-jerk answer would be manatees, but I can't think how that works. 

Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra

Those words are from the text of the Requiem mass... 'when the heavens and the earth are moving'. 

The recent terrible events in Nepal reminded me of three things.

The first  was 'The Great Peruvian Earthquake' of 31 May 1970. Again there was a complete   breakdown in communications. As it happened there was something  else going on not too far away, kicking off on that very day: the Mexico World Cup. The father of a member of the group I sang and played with was Peruvian, and was trying in vain to get news of his family. It struck me as ironic that at a time when hundreds of journalists with millions of pounds worth of hi-techery (which we had been told about in awestruck tones for weeks beforehand by Jimmy Hill  and his fellow pundits – the instantaneous action-replay  was a new invention at the time

<weasel_words>
...well maybe not brand new. Perhaps like many technological sporting innovations it was known of but thought too expensive – until an excuse for conspicuous consumption arose (something REALLY IMPORTANT like the FIFA World Cup.)
</weasel_words>

, and was going to revolutionize football commentary) were so nearby (well, on the same page of the map at least), the plight of the Peruvians was so dire.

I being in my Peter  Starstedt  phase (Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  had spent 4 weeks at no. 1 a few months previously) I wrote a song – another of Paul Simon's 'songs that voices never shared':

<digression> 

In homage to Starstedt's whimsical Zeitgeist-y references ('You sip your Napoleon brandy, and never get your lips wet'...) I had odd portentous sallies like 'What have you done, Jules Rimet?' The most heavily ironic touch  was a setting  of the football chant

Ee Aye Addio We won the Cup

in a minor  key. Pretty poignant, I think you'll agree.  

</digression>

The second was a reflexion on musical settings relating to earthquakes, which I wrote nearly a year ago here, and which I felt merited another airing:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes). [Update: the main piece had referred to Verdi‘s Requiem, which, at the time, I had recently sung.]

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

The third was to wonder if there was any remote etymological link between 'terra-' and 'terror' – and it seems there's not.  It's just a coincidence that earthquakes (Sp. terremotos

<digression>
I use terremoto rather than tierra lest anyone think 'But of course  tierr- is not the same as terr-.'  A Spanish speaker wouldn't feel this, being used to the e/ie variation under conditions of stress in some sorts of /e/. This accounts for many irregular Spanish verbs, such as tener – with stressed tiene [='he/she/it has'] but unstressed tenemos ['we have'] (well, not totally unstressed of course, but unstressed in the relevant syllable). (Italian doesn't do this: terracotta but also terra.)

</digression>

) are both terrible and terrifying.

The Proto-Indo-European root for tierra is given in Etymonline‘s entry for 'terrain':

...from terra "earth, land," literally "dry land" (as opposed to "sea"); from PIE root *ters- "to dry" 

Meanwhile, under 'terror', the source is different:

...from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (see terrible).

         See more here (if you're that way inclined).

And the possibility of a metathetical link between *ters- and *tres- doesn‘t seem to me worth fretting about; that would be a supposed phonological development in a language that exists  only in  the minds of a few linguists.

OK – Real Life calls.

b

Update: 2015.04.28.11:20 – Added notes in red.
Update: 2015.04.30.09:20 – Added PS.

PS At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day), and the latest version of the graph I gave then reflects this:

Update: 2015.05.01.22:55 – Added illustration  from the Libera Me.
Update: 2016.01.23.11:30 – Embellished reminiscence in purple.

Respighi and the Doppler Effect

This morning on Radio 3 I caught a snatch of Respighi's Pines of Rome, specifically the fourth movement, Pini della Via Appia, which according to the presenter depicts Roman legionaries marching to (or from?) Rome. From the sound of it, my feeling is that they were probably marching back to Rome after one of their less successful campaigns; the 'marching' ostinato sounds to me rather disgruntled. (And, if the word's new to you, think of the English cognate obstinate  – it's a stubbornly repetitive bass line [well, usually bass; there may be exceptions – in matters musical I'm a dilettante {delighting in it}, rather than a cognoscento {knowing about it}]).

Which leads me, more or  less seamlessly, on to Italian words in music – not a boring list (that's what Wikipedia's for), just a few that have piqued my interest.

<digression theme="pique">
I wonder if pique has anything to do with pizzicato...? That'll have to remain FFS as they say in the OSI world: 'For Further Study', though it would,  if true,  exemplify the tendency of Italian loans and derivations dealing with the arts, while Spanish loans and derivations tend to deal with the more immediate and physical; picante is the Spanish word I'm thinking of, obviously connected with pique.

On the other hand, Ital... no, no time for even-handedness now.
</digression>

Italian words and music go together, though 'Italian' is a concept that post-dates a lot of music we listen to.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1999-2002" theme="Italian">
A good few years ago, I sang (not with my present choir) Howard Blake's Song of St Francis. The setting was mid-late 20th century, but the text was by St Francis of Assisi, written in whatever Italic dialect he spoke – Umbrian of the 13th century, probably.  But saying it was written in that dialect is an oversimplification. Vulgar Latin had various different substrates – whatever medium of spoken communication underlay it – throughout Romania (in the historical sense of 'that part of the world that was directly influenced by the Romans'). St Francis may have thought (if he thought about it at all) he was writing Latin. Strongly influenced as his life was by Latin texts, it is probably a rather Latinate form of his dialect.

Anyway, speculation like that is something I left behind 40-odd years ago. The point is that during rehearsals people asked now and then about the text – sometimes 'in the original', sometimes 'in the Italian' sometimes 'in the Latin'. And after a while, knowing that I knew a bit about languages, they asked me  'What is it, Bob?' But my answer left a lot to be desired. It wasn't 'Latin'; it wasn't (just) Umbrian; it certainly wasn't Italian – a language that wouldn't be codified for several centuries.

Shortly afterwards, the same choir sang from Verdi's Nabucco. OK, by now it can be called 'Italian'. But that doesn't mean it's the sort of Italian you'll find in Parliamo Italiano. 

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks  'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with  DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'. To flesh out the Iberian picture, confirming the preference for derivation from UNDE, Portuguese has onde and Catalan has on.

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...?) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

(something like that – it's a while since I sang it... Yes, here it is:

) the ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr. chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa  – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). And as for olezzare, my Italian dictionary (admittedly not the most scholarly of tomes) does not recognize it at all.

<retraction>
It's fine. Lousy dictionary.
</retraction>

</autobiographical_note>

Oops. Tempus has fugitted, in the immortal words of my old maths master. I'll get on to those musical terms in an update.

b

PS

But I can't leave you guessing about Doppler. I thought, when I first heard that Respighi piece – in a realization a bit like Bob Peck's in Jurassic Park, when he thinks he's hunting a velociraptor but there are actually two, hunting him, and his last words are 'Clever girl' – that the ostinato bass mimicked the Doppler Effect by falling in pitch at the high point of the crescendo, to mark the arrival in the foreground of the marching soldiers. But I checked on YouTube, and I was wrong. Pity.

Update 2014.09.11.09:20  – Added red bits.

Update 2014.09.14.21:45  – Added this update, [a few more thoughts about musical terminology.]

It was my mentor Joe Cremona (mentioned in several of my other posts – see the word  cloud on the right)  who pointed out that Italian native speakers pronounce mezzo with the voiced affricate /ʣ/ and prezzo with the unvoiced affricate /ʦ/ without – for the most part – knowing the reason: that the one with voicing is derived from MEDIU(M) and the one without voicing from PRETIU(M). Yet I've never heard a mezzo-soprano called (in English) a /meʣəʊ/. Of course I'm not saying the English pronunciation 'should' have the /ʣ/;  it's just interesting that it doesn't.

<inline_PS>
Just thought: I wonder if it‘s because in the word soprano (apart from the sonorants) all the consonants are unvoiced, which favours the voiceless pronunnciation of mezzo. The same, incidentally, to mezzo-forte and mezzo-piano.
</inline_PS>

Another double letter in musical terminology forms one of a pair of similar-looking little notes, distinguished only by a "/" through one of them: the appoggiatura and the acciacatura. In the second of these, the "i" softens the "c", so that the word has five syllables: [a'ʧakatura]. Again, the only pronunciation I have heard (admittedly rarely) is [aki.aka'tura]; and again I'm not suggesting that anyone 'should' do anything.

The appoggiatura 'leans on' or 'presses on' the note it precedes; (Mozart was a great fan). Meanwhile, the acciacatura is a sort of sneeze squashed in before the note it precedes. And music theoreticians about to raise an eyebrow at that sneeze metaphor will be interested – though possibly not convinced – by my mnemonic for remembering which is which: acciacatura/atchoo.

<digression>
And, incidentally, no less an authority than Gyles Brandreth claimed on the radio a few weeks ago that 'atishoo' is derived from à tes souhaits, which takes the biscuit, I suspect, in the too-good-to-be-true department. I must look into it, but it smacks to me of folk etymology.
</digression>

I imagine the Italian appoggiare is cognate with the French appuyer. But the Spanish ignores the double p and has just apoyar. Another musical double letter, attacca(r), has lost the second double letter in the French attaquer. But Spanish dispenses with both: atacar.

<digression theme ="Spanish and double consonants">
In fact, Spanish and  double stops don't mix. Which leads some people to say Spanish has no double consonants. Au contraire. 'But the dog...' leads to the most obvious counter-example: pero el perro...  

I am on shakier ground when I point to ll and even shakier with ñ. What Spanish seems to have done is this: take double consonants and give them independence as new autonomous letters. Children's alphabet blocks in Spain have both l and ll. And students using Spanish dictionaries are often confounded by the  fact that llama doesn't fall after liar and before lobo; ll is a whole 'nother letter.

The ñ really is a new letter (in that it's a different shape from nn). But that is where it came from – the manuscript convention that saves ink, space, and effort by writing nn as ñ. A lady in Portuguese is donna; in Spanish it's doña.
</digression>

But where was I? (Late for my 8 o'clock, that's where.)

Update 2014.09.25.12:15 – Updated footer

Update 2015.05.12.14:15 – Added musical illustration

Update 2017.05.04.17:55 – Added inline PS, in blue.

Moving heaven and earth

On Saturday week I shall, ojalá, deo volente, weather permitting, etc, be singing Verdi's Requiem [details of the concert here or, after the 29 June 2014, here], and in preparation for the concert I was browsing the text the other day. Here and there in the Latin, despite various teachers' efforts, there is a word or words that I don't understand; and I thought I would wile away [see here if you think that's a typo – the footnote, and the Update arising from it ] the time on a bus journey going through the translation.

But it turned out that that word (translation) calls for a pair of quotation marks (or perhaps that should be QUOTATION MARKS...? " "...? ) The publisher prints a note at the beginning:

...Permission must be obtained from the publishers if it is wished to perform the work in this new English translation..

Can any choir have wished this fate on themselves? And I imagine the publishers had (realistic?) visions of money changing hands; why else would they require formal written permission? The mind boggles.

Most such works have the self-awareness to call themselves 'singing versions' or something of the kind. The problems are obvious. Take the first word, 'Requiem'; three syllables. Most singing versions just have 'Re/qui/em' – good enough. But our man at Ricordi, Geoffrey Dunn, it says here, knows better: 'Rest and peace'. Hmm.

Rest and peace eternal give them, Lord Our God; and light for evermore shine down upon them. 

'...and light for evermore shine down...' Why, for heaven's sake? The Latin is a straightforward noun phrase: lux perpetua. Most singing versions (and indeed prose translations, as I remember from a misspent childhood) content themselves with 'perpetual light'. But not Mr Dunn; 'change for change's sake' is the order of the day; I imagine he would translate that as Ars gratia artis, though I'm not convinced that ars is the same thing as 'change'. Not content with a simple adjective for perpetua he contorts the original prayer into an inverted monstrosity featuring an adverbial phrase. Besides, he has removed the prayerful mystery of that perpetual light. Dunn's could be a torch powered by a nuclear reactor.

Elsewhere I have asked 'Why can't translators just GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?' Moving on to the Sanctus, not having time for a detailed critique:

Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua

Easy enough: 'Heaven and earth are full of your glory', right? (Or, if you must, 'Full are heaven and earth...') . But Mr Dunn needs something more. Another idea perhaps?

Earth and heaven are full of echoes to Thy glory

Once again, this meddlesome 'translator' has removed the prayerful mystery of the original. Gloria tua is an ablative – 'with your glory'. Mr Dunn has asked himself  'But what's making the noise?' Echoes of course!

But having got his teeth into a device (introducing new ideas^‡‡), he won't put it down. The second time those words appear, he goes one better:

Earth and heaven are full of echoes praising Thy glory

And what can have been his reason for swapping 'heaven' and 'earth' around? 'Heaven and earth' is what corpus linguists call a strong collocation... a very strong one. The British National Corpus has 66 cases of 'heaven and earth' and only 3 of the inverted form. The Corpus of Contemporary American shows slightly more tolerance for the inverted form (340 plays 26 in a much bigger corpus) but 'heaven and earth' is normal.

There are things native speakers just know about ordering words: native speakers of English just don't say 'the red big bus'. ESOL students learn a rule about this sort of thing, but native speakers don't have to. Most of them don't know it. Teachers of ESOL know it (or in some cases  [!] know where to find it). But when you change the order you are consciously doing something different: 'No, not the green one, the RED big bus'. (Even there it sounds pretty odd; I think I'd say '... the big RED bus'; but contrastive stress can change otherwise fixed word orders.)

So rather than dismiss Dunn's order out of hand, we should perhaps consider what sort of exception he's trying to make. Is the music involved, perhaps? Looking at the music introduces yet another variant (on pp. 143-4 of the Ricordi edition):

Heaven and earth fill with echoes,  praising Thy glory

And perhaps the music explains the change back to 'heaven and earth'. A lot is happening in the music here, and the 2nd choir don't have the words at all. But the sopranos in the 1st choir are singing a descending scale; for them  to sing 'Earth and heaven' would be plain contrary.

The idea of a tune influencing the words suggested to me the bass line on p. 207 of the Ricordi edition. Heaven and earth are involved here too, but not in the Pleni sunt coeli... context; it is the cosmic disaster (a pleasingly apt word, given the derivation from the Latin astrum [='star']^†) that strikes on the Dies irae. From coeli starting on a G (and flirting for a bar with notes as high as C) the basses drop down an octave for the word terra. And what does Mr Dunn's 'translation' do here?

When the high heav'n and all the earth are ... (all on the top note) and  
shaken (on the lower G)

This really is contrary. You've got a high word ('heaven') and a low word ('earth') simply  crying out to be reflected in the music. Verdi showed the way. But Mr Dunn knew better.

An observation about Fauré's word painting is at the back of my mind, but it'll have to stay there for the time being – an update, perhaps...? But for now I must get back to learning the music. Don't miss the concert!

b
Update 2014.06.22.16:45 – Added this note:

^†When Shakespeare called Romeo and Juliet 'star-crossed', I wonder whether he was tipping the wink to the more erudite in his audience: 'Here comes a disaster'.  The word désastre was only borrowed from French in the late-sixteenth century, so if so it was a pretty trendy bit of wordplay.

Update 2014.06.23.11:15 – Added this  PS:
PS to footnote: But maybe I'm overestimating the relevance of erudition in this context. At the time, probably the lowliest of the groundlings knew that astrology and disaster went hand in hand. The existence of the new borrowing  is not relevant (silly me).

Update 2014.06.25.15:00  – Added  this PPS:

On the subject of word painting (which I think is the expression for writing musically suggestive settings), as a foil to Verdi's setting of the words 'heaven and earth', this observation about Fauré's setting of those words occurred to me.

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth  seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes).

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of  Libera me.

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.'

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will^††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom.

<PREscript>
Well over a year ago I wrote  a piece about prescriptive grammars (the ones that say you're doing everything wrong and tell you how you should oughter).

In it I wrote a longish digression about what I was singing at the time. It seems rather (indeed, more...:-?) apt here, so here it is:

My choice of 'listen out' as an example [of a phrasal verb – see the full context here] is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem [and THIS season, Verdi's], which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano solo tune^‡ marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

Then the speaker thinks better of this impertinent fortissimo interruption, and repeats Exaudi  – but piano. The id then reasserts itself with the next word fortissimo: 'No I'm  not going to be quiet and reverential.' The internal dialogue between the super-ego and the id is reminiscent of Gollum's arguments with himself. 

^‡ ...Fauré made the elementary mistake of not making this a solo – though it is a sweet and angelic-sounding tune sung by the sopranos. Apologies for this lapse ( – he was only young! [not so young, I was thinking of his Cantique de Jean Racine, written while he was still at school])
</PREscript>

Update 2014.06.26.09:50 – Added gloss to Dum veneris, and typo fix.

Update 2014.06.27.11:25 – Added this note:

 ^††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

Update 2014.06.29.19:45 – Added this PPPS:
PPPS One last Geoffrey Dunn horror, but I don't have the text any more. Having written above about Exaudi (the bit in red) I was listening out (!) for the treatment of this verb. As I said, I don't have the text to hand, so I'm not sure of his word for latronem [= Sp: ladrón] in

Et latronem exaudisti

I'd've said something like 'and who heeded [see above for why it's not just 'heard'] the thief'. But our Geoffrey turns the syntax inside out and makes it 'and the robber won Thy pity'. Oh dear...

Update 2014.06.277.31.18:50 – Added this note:

 ^‡‡ On re-reading I see that he has form for this: in the first line of the piece he does it twice – Requiem → 'Rest and peace'; Domine → 'Lord Our God.

Update 2014.08.10.16:15 – Added this PPPPS:
I've run out of handy footnote symbols, so you'll have to do a bit of DIY to place this. It's 2 or 3  screens down (but YMMV), where I talk about 'the red big bus'. A recent Slate post addressed this point, in what it announces as

A long fascinating article—or is it a fascinating long article?

I  expect it is, though I confess I haven't read it carefully.