Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
Subject: Franz Schubert: Love Has Lied Mon Dec 03, 2012 4:39 pm
I like all different sorts of music, and every now and again I really enjoy opera. Yesterday while sorting through some of my things I happened across a note in my own handwriting:
Now that love has falsely played me, And sore the pain I bear. Betrayed me, yes, betrayed me Has all that seemed so fair.
I usually cite the author on such notations but had not on this case, so I went to my good pal Google for help. Welllll, it took me an hour or two because of many different German to English translations and that sort of thing, but finally found it:
The poem (credit: August Graf von Platen) to which the opera was set was written in German under the video, and (badly, I believe, which I will explain momentarily) translates as follows:
Love has lied, The concern is heavy, Cheated, oh! cheated It all about me! There hot flow drops Cheek down always, Cease to knock my heart, You poor heart forbear,! Love has lied, The concern is heavy, Cheated, oh! cheated It all about me!
I believe the word "concern" above should actually be translated as "pain." Here is one of the write-ups on the opera, which is one of the reasons for which I think above is a poor translation:
Now love has falsely played me / Franz Schubert
(Die liebe hat gelogen)
August Graf von Platen
C minor D751 (Op. 23/1) Peters II p.60 GA XX no.410 March/April 1822
In a catalog filled with brokenhearted love songs sung by singers who all too often seem to have been deranged by their loss, Schubert's Die Liebe hat gelogen (Love has lied) (D. 751, Op. 23/1), from the year 1822, seems heroically reserved. The poem by Count August von Platen itself is laconic enough: in two brief four-line verses, the poet writes simply and without literary affectation of having been deceived in love. Indeed, only in the second verse does the poet even express any personal feelings at all. And in his setting of the poem, Schubert repeats the first verse, thereby containing the personal feelings of the second verse within the brave reticence of the first verse. The long-breathed vocal melody of the outer verses is sung against a grandly noble slow C minor accompaniment while the more expressive second verse modulates rapidly and painfully upwards to the lament "You poor heart, beat no more!" before returning to the first verse.
Oddly, some of the harmonic changes of the song seem to predict the chordal refrain from Schubert's much later Die Nebensonnen from his Winterreise cycle of 1827.