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fpbLet us start with two truly great love songs, sang half a century ago by a giant of the opera stage:
And let us compare it with a contemporary performance of the second of these, with which readers of this blog are already familiar:
A charming performance and a fine voice, no doubt; and rather less Russian accent than one would expect. (For that matter,Giuseppe Pippo di Stefano was a Sicilian from Catania, which, where Naples and the Neapolitan language are concerned, amounts pretty much to the same thing.) But I do not think that it takes a great deal of familiarity with the technique of song to feel very strongly that something very important has gone out from the first performance to the second.
These are serenades: songs to be sung to one's beloved from the street, in a climate and country where families assumed that girls would be kept for marriage and that men had a duty to be faithful. In other words, the background assumption that shapes the song is marriage for life, patrolled by severe penalties for violators. For this reason, the lover is supposed to sing to his beloved from outside; the walls of the house incarnate the power of the family, which is not to be lightly dealt with or violated.
But for this reason, too, the singer who knows what he is about will put not only grace, but muscle too, in this kind of love song. He must not only convince the girl that she is loved; he must convince her and her family that he is a full man - strong enough to be faithful, strong enough to protect and care for his wife and the children who will arise, strong enough to take a commitment for life. This is at the core of the imagery of the lyrics. The last stanza of Dicitencello Vuje, addressing the beloved for the first time (the song had started with an address to her friends, "you talk to this lady friend of yours, I can't"), says that she herself is the bond, the golden chain, who will hold him all his life long: Te voglio bene... Te voglio bene assaje... Si' tu chesta catena ca nun se spezza maje! ("I care for you, I care for you so much - you are yourself this chain, and it will never break!"). Do I even have to add that the symbol of marriage is a golden ring?
Sure, it can lead to lifelong unhappiness. Which is why these songs must contain something more than beauty, something more than grace, something more even than strength - something that can only be described as heroism. The man who sings such a song is taking his whole future life in his hands, merely on the strength of his love for a girl. The risk is terrible, and in the society in which these songs were composed it was unrelieved by any such thing as divorce. And the authors did not hide the fact: a whole sub-genre of comic songs exists purely about the miseries of marriage, going back to the middle ages. (It bears saying that the assumption behind these songs, in turn, is that you are not allowed either to get rid of a termagant wife or to beat her into submission. In other words, marriage means taking a lifelong commitment to put up with someone you may end up not standing; and the rest of the world may well find it funny, too.)
Muscle and heroism have completely gone out of the Russian singer's version. It is merely pretty; you would not stake your life on it. But you might stake a night.
This is the hideous betrayal of love and marriage in which we live, without even realizing it. The idiot schoolgirls who cheer at the fact that Iowa has lined up to destroy marriage don't know that they are cheering the certainty of their own coming loneliness and emptiness; the fact that they will never meet anyone who would not only risk his life for them, but bet his life on them. The reduction of marriage to a kind of contract for regular fucking, with a built-in escape clause and no provision for fertility, means the permanent weakening of society. And if you want to know why, compare the strength, let alone the heroism, of Pippo di Stefano's account with that of a modern singer.
And let us compare it with a contemporary performance of the second of these, with which readers of this blog are already familiar:
A charming performance and a fine voice, no doubt; and rather less Russian accent than one would expect. (For that matter,
These are serenades: songs to be sung to one's beloved from the street, in a climate and country where families assumed that girls would be kept for marriage and that men had a duty to be faithful. In other words, the background assumption that shapes the song is marriage for life, patrolled by severe penalties for violators. For this reason, the lover is supposed to sing to his beloved from outside; the walls of the house incarnate the power of the family, which is not to be lightly dealt with or violated.
But for this reason, too, the singer who knows what he is about will put not only grace, but muscle too, in this kind of love song. He must not only convince the girl that she is loved; he must convince her and her family that he is a full man - strong enough to be faithful, strong enough to protect and care for his wife and the children who will arise, strong enough to take a commitment for life. This is at the core of the imagery of the lyrics. The last stanza of Dicitencello Vuje, addressing the beloved for the first time (the song had started with an address to her friends, "you talk to this lady friend of yours, I can't"), says that she herself is the bond, the golden chain, who will hold him all his life long: Te voglio bene... Te voglio bene assaje... Si' tu chesta catena ca nun se spezza maje! ("I care for you, I care for you so much - you are yourself this chain, and it will never break!"). Do I even have to add that the symbol of marriage is a golden ring?
Sure, it can lead to lifelong unhappiness. Which is why these songs must contain something more than beauty, something more than grace, something more even than strength - something that can only be described as heroism. The man who sings such a song is taking his whole future life in his hands, merely on the strength of his love for a girl. The risk is terrible, and in the society in which these songs were composed it was unrelieved by any such thing as divorce. And the authors did not hide the fact: a whole sub-genre of comic songs exists purely about the miseries of marriage, going back to the middle ages. (It bears saying that the assumption behind these songs, in turn, is that you are not allowed either to get rid of a termagant wife or to beat her into submission. In other words, marriage means taking a lifelong commitment to put up with someone you may end up not standing; and the rest of the world may well find it funny, too.)
Muscle and heroism have completely gone out of the Russian singer's version. It is merely pretty; you would not stake your life on it. But you might stake a night.
This is the hideous betrayal of love and marriage in which we live, without even realizing it. The idiot schoolgirls who cheer at the fact that Iowa has lined up to destroy marriage don't know that they are cheering the certainty of their own coming loneliness and emptiness; the fact that they will never meet anyone who would not only risk his life for them, but bet his life on them. The reduction of marriage to a kind of contract for regular fucking, with a built-in escape clause and no provision for fertility, means the permanent weakening of society. And if you want to know why, compare the strength, let alone the heroism, of Pippo di Stefano's account with that of a modern singer.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-03 07:52 am (UTC)Some of those girls will meet other girls who will risk their lives for them and bet their lives on them. Now that such unions are becoming more accepted, perhaps fewer of them will have to die for their love.
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Date: 2009-09-03 08:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-03 07:44 pm (UTC)