English as a Medium for Song

Dora Duty Jones

[EDITOR'S NOTE. - Mr. David Bispham, the eminent concert and operatic baritone, whose endeavors to have (he English language more extensively represented upon our concert programs, has called the attention of THE ETUDE lo the new work entitled "The Technique of Speech," by Dora Duty .Tones. Special permission to publish the following extract has been obtained from Harper Brothers. The, work is copyright, 1900.]

THERE is a tradition among singers, already so ancient as to have become a fixed article of their artistic creed, that English is an unmusical language, un - beautiful, if not impossible to sing.

It can be readily shown, however, that this fairly international prejudice is due rather to foreign influences, circumstances and accident, than to lack of poetic and lyric resources in our literature, or to intrinsic faults and characteristic defects of the language as a medium for song. In the first place, the great composers having sprung chiefly from the more musical Romanic and Germanic races, the texts of their composition have naturally been chosen from the literature of those nations. By the same token, the majority of great singers, being also of foreign birth and training, choose for their repertoires operas and songs written in their mother - tongue or in other continental languages familiar to them. That the limited number of good English songs so rarely figure on the programs of foreign artists does not, indeed, so much argue unmusical flaws in our language as the singer's practical omission in the requisite free mastery of English diction. Except in rare cases, like that of Adelina Patti, who was to the manner born, even those foreign singers who speak the language well do so by ear alone, and having little or no knowledge of the phonetic structure of English speech, are unable to adapt the same to the demands of tone - production.

Again, until recent years, few English artists have been able to sing acceptably those foreign languages wedded to music, so to speak; and even they have been obliged to depend on translations in order to bring the work of foreign composers within the grasp of the average English and American audience. To judge a language by its translations from other songs is indeed a sorry test of the music of its versification merely; how much more, then, of its intrinsic merits as a vehicle for original song! It has been aptly said that the best translation is but the reverse side of a tapestry, and it were surely an act of supererogation to blame the obliging rhymesters who endeavor to meet the present enormous demands for English versions of foreign musical texts, since our poets - scorning the task? - fail to supply our need. Yet it is by just such mongrel productions that artists, foreign especially, are apt to pass judgment upon our language as a medium of song.

When we are given translations of translations the case cries out for international arbitration in behalf of the poet who furnished the original text.

Witness, for example, the following English version of a verse from the text of one of Grieg's exquisite lieder, that comes to us from Scandinavia via Germany:

"Just a year on the mountain cragged.
Rocks and reefs with their jaws all jagged!
Shore and sea with waves that wallow,
Roaring, rearing, like caverns hollow.
So we wander on ways of danger,
But. tho' bold, o'er the bounds no ranger!"
- From the Norwegian of A. 0. Vinger, through the German of E. Lobedanz. Edition Peters

In the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, our language surely possesses the supreme model, the very triumph of the translator's art. Call his work "mere paraphrase" who will, Fitzgerald has so adequately turned Omar's text to the gratification of English ears, and the English understanding, wit, and intuition, that no English soul at least cares whether the original was written in Persian, Chaldec, or Stone-Age Finnish. The dry bones of philology may rattle, and case - hardened antiquarians jealously contend for the "integrity" of the Persian text, yet the very dust of the poet might stir, could he hear his own thoughts start and throb and spontaneously move in such lines as:

"Wake ! For the sun. who scattered into flight
The stars before him from the field of night,
Drives night along with them from Heaven and strikes
The Sultan's turret with a shaft of light."

THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Among American poets, Bayard Taylor has given us a translation of Goethe's Faust that for fidelity to the original text, combined with poetic grace and spontaneity, is equaled only by Schlegel's version of Shakespeare's dramas.

Again, in Longfellow's skillful handling of the Romance languages, as well as his masterful free use of the metric forms of the Finnish Ka'avala for the embodiment of the legendary lore of the North American Indian, we have further proof of the composite adaptability of English as a unique medium for the transmission of the poetic thought of all nations into the universal language of song.

"The English language," says Jacob Grimm, "by and through which the most eminent poet of modern times - of course I can refer only to Shakespeare - was begotten and nourished, has a just claim to be called a language of the world, and it appears to be destined, like the English race, to a higher and broader sway over all the earth." And again, Emerson compares our speech to "a sea that receives tributaries from every nation under the sun."

That this poetic wealth has bred so few native composers is no proof that the language is not adaptable to the musical forms. Poetry, having its intrinsic music is not, like song, dependent for completeness on the sister art. The Anglo - Saxon genius has rarely voiced itself in music, and now that MacDowell has vanished from the hither shore of the vast sea of speech which unites England and America, our one great living composer, Elgar, stands as solitary among our rising song - writers as some lone mountain peak above surrounding foothills. But as Mr. Matthews has recently pointed out. English is rapidly becoming the second speech of all cultivated peoples. The genuine composer's art is not bounded by his native tongue, else Handel had hardly so glorified his name in England; and it is, perhaps, to more musical nations that we must still look, for the time being, for such worthy espousals of our poetic treasures. Certainly no other living language can offer to the composers of the future so rich, so varied and so flexible a medium for the construction of opera and oratorio texts as ours.

English being a more complex language than either Italian. French or German, the work of the American singer demands special training, but those singers who will devote even a single year to the mastery of the technic of speech according to the laws of resonance will be surprised and delighted to find with what ease ;md beauty English may be sung.

To the observant student of the trend of contemporary music it is evident that the world is destined to play a role of ever - increasing importance in the song and opera of the future. Indeed, much of the musical work of Debussy, Wolf, and other song writers of these post Wagnerian days, is utterly unintelligible without a full understanding of the text. Actors who can sing rind singers who possess dramatic ability have sought to meet this demand by trying to bridge the gulf that separates the speaking - voice from the singing - voice with "cantilations" and other artistic hybrids which are neither speech nor song.