Fanny MendelsTochter

<explanation>
Perhaps the title of this post needs a bit of explanation. Fanny, the daughter of Abraham  Mendelssohn, was educated musically alongside her brother Felix (four years her junior). But after a few years her father (who was worldly-wise enough to append the name 'Bartholdy' to his name before becoming a pillar of the bourgeoisie) decreed that her destiny was as a mother and home-maker, so he would fritter away no more on her education; she was banished from the music room, except for ornamental purposes.  

But Mendels Sohn (Mendel's son) was Felix, who by a chromosomatic accident 'merited' a musical education; so any of the names usually given her by historians (Fanny Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.... autcetera), seems to me a little demeaning. I have adopted the Icelandic naming convention (used by several female composers of contemporary music such as Karólina Eiriksdóttir, Selma Björnsdóttir,  Haldis Bjarnadóttir...

<hmmm possibilty-of-update="5">
The Wikipedia list of female composers includes four -dóttirs, all born since 1951. I wonder if this naming convention is a recent phenomenon.
</hmmm>

...) whereby a man is a -sohn and a woman is a -dóttir. This still leaves the woman as a man's chattel, but at least the father has some genetic input. And I've kept her German-ness: Fanny MendelsTochter.

</explanation> 

Abraham wrote to Fanny, (then in her early teens) in 1820:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.  

Thus fortified in her resolve to be a composer of significance, she wrote (mainly) songs, rather than anything designed for the concert hall, and this limit to her ambitions was something that she herself embraced (rather pathetically – but what else could she do that wouldn't involve her incarceration as a lunatic?):

I lack the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency. Therefore lieder suit me best, in which, if need be, merely a pretty idea without much potential for development can suffice. 

Letter to Felix, 1835

 By the time she wrote this she had been married for five or six years, and her generous and supportive husband, William Hensel, encouraged her to publish (previously discouraged by her family...

<oops>
Not content with simply discouraging it, they actually involved her in a musicological fraud, allowing her to publish six of her lieder as part of her little brother's opus 8 and 9. This led to an embarrassing mistake made during Felix's tour to Great Britain, when he was invited to Buckingham Palace to accompany Queen Victoria (soprano). She chose one of 'his' lieder – presumably because she found some sisterly fellow feeling in it – and he had to admit that it was his big sister's.

</oops>

...) and sponsored musical soirées that attracted the great and the good from the local musical scene. But she published as 'Fanny Hensel' and is known to history as either Fanny Mendelssohn or Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.

Prime Video are showing a fascinating program called Fanny: the Other Mendelssohn. It's 2 hours long and I'm working my way through it. If you can, it's worth a look.

That's enough for now

b

 

Third time lucky?

In 2014 I wrote (here) about, among other things, the song sung by Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 'Ne me quitte pas'. Revisiting that post in 2018 I added an afterthought that was meant to clarify my earlier piece but was unlikely to, because it assumed readers would go to YouTube and listen to the song in question. To make it even less scrutable, my 2018 note used a bit of French teacher's jargon – e-muet. All things considered, it was a pretty duff attempt at communication.

 <prescript>
Those words had been set to a very different tune (Very different?... Discuss) about five years earlier by Jacques Brel. It's hard to say exactly how long before, as the gestation period of  a song is presumably much shorter than that of a sung-through film, so 'about five years' will have to do. Brel's Ne me quitte pas was followed a few years later by Dusty Springfield's If you go away to the same tune. But this time, it seems to me that the English version does preserve the sentiment of the original. [2024 note: I had previously objected to the translation of the film song.]

The line Ne me quitte pas starts out, uncomfortably for the translator, with two unstressed syllables. So the two obvious options are 'Never go away' (which is pathetic) and 'Don't you go away', which is bathetic (it sounds as though it should be followed by something like '...you little minx'). The Parapluies de Cherbourg song avoids the problem by splitting the unstressed words over two lines; even then, I don't think the underlay (as we say in the trade – the way the words fit the tune) would get a very high mark in a Grade V Theory exam. The amour's stress is wrong, and the ne is left out on a limb.

<2018_PS ref="YouTube clip">
The guilty setting is from 1'45" to 1'52", and I missed  – when first writing – another serious deficiency. I gave only two problems: the stress on amour and the isolation of ne at the end of a line. I missed a third: the stress on the e-muet at the end of quitte.
</2012_PS>

Anyway 'If you go away' works for me in the Jacques Brel song.
</prescript>

Here's a third attempt.

The words Catherine Deneuve sings (to the tune known to us impoverished Anglophones as 'I will wait for you') are

Mais mon a-mour ne

Me quitt-e pas

<misericord>
(I should explain the tag misericord, for non-students of monastic choir stalls furniture. There is, surprisingly, a website that tells you all about misericords if you've got time to kill. But I'll save you the bother of doing your own research. A misericord was a sticking out bit attached to the bottom of a hinged seat in choir stalls. It allowed a monk singing Prime at some ungodly...

<parenthesis>
Perhaps not le mot juste 
</parenthesis> 

... hour to take the weight off his feet – thus affording misericordia.   An English version of that French lyric is here. The equivalent lines are sung from 0'37" to 0'46".

I have used this device, which takes pity on the user's infirmity in some physical respect, as a metaphor for an explanation that takes pity on a reader's presumed ignorance.

</misericord>

She stresses the first syllable of amour, which (like all French polysyllables is stressed, in spoken French, on the last); this leaves the ne (not complete in meaning until it gets its pas, so not meriting stress) in an automatically stressed position at the end of a line.

We come now to the last sentence of my 2018 PS, and the central word in it, e-muet. I don't know whether French teachers today use the word 'e-muet' but mine did. 

<autobiographical-note>
He – Cedric Baring-Gould...

<meta-autobiographical-note>
[the reason, incidentally, for my choice of  college, as a former pupil of his had been the first in my school to go to Cambridge]
</meta-autobiographical-note>

... – also used a huge Grundig reel-to-reel magnétophone. He schlepped this multi-kilo apparatus, day in day out, from classroom to classroom, realizing  – unusually for the time – the importance, in modern language teaching, of giving learners the actual sounds of native speakers. Today's MFL (modern foreign language) teachers have recourse to YouTube for examples from real-life foreign speakers, thus avoiding curvature of the spine; not so for poor old Cedric.)

</autobiographical-note>

And  another thing:

<autobiographical-note
In the many Berkshire Youth Choir concerts I attended during the early Noughties my least-favourite (and therefore seemingly most common) piece was Gwyn Arch's setting of The Sound of Silence.

<brickbat-dodging>
That's not BYC in the clip, I hasten to add. But it's the Gwyn Arch setting.
</brickbat-dodging>

Where Paul Simon has 'Neath the halo of a-a streetlamp' Gwyn Arch has 'Neath the halo of a streeeetlamp'. And while a solo voice can just about get away with that 'a-a' it seems to me that a few dozen voices singing streeeetlamp'. sound plain ridiculous.
</autobiographical-note

'Up up my friend and quit your blog

Or surely you'll grow double' 

as Wossname put it. That's enough.

b