Antonin DVORAK : SOUL MUSIC - BBC RADIO 4 | Gypsy Songs: Songs My Mother Taught Me
Soul Music this morning on BBC Radio Four looked at the piece ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me' by Dvorak and also touched upon the Charles Ives version of the same song some fifteen years later after Dvorak had written his original. I think I have mentioned that I was introduced to the work of Charles Ives by my tutor at art school, the composer Gavin Bryars, and I am eternally grateful for that. This piece by Ives, Dvorak’s contemporary, is remarkable I thought though I also very much enjoyed the Dvorak piece itself. The Radio 4 series usually to my experience looks at classic pop songs or things from the more popular canon and this was a welcome change. Hope you enjoy it here too
Antonin Dvorak wrote his Gypsy Songs in 1880. He was passionate about the folk music of his native Bohemia and set a poem by Czech poet Adolf Heyduk to music. Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth song in the cycle.
Songs my Mother taught me
In the days long vanished
Seldom from her eyelids
Were the teardrops banished....
It's a wistful melancholic piece evoking memory and loss. Soul Music hears the stories of musicians, poets and singers from around the world of why they are so drawn to it.
The poet Raine Geoghegan is the daughter of a Romany woman whose life was weighed down with the loss of her father at a young age. Raine identifies with the sadness of the music because it not only represents grief at the loss of her father but also for the loss of a way of life for the gypsy people.
For Emily MacGregor it's all about the music we inherit from our parents. She is writing a book about music and grief and says this piece perfectly represents the bittersweet feeling of listening to music associated with the loss of a loved one. Dvorak had already lost three children in infancy by the time he wrote his Zigeuner Lieder.
Paris based violinist and conductor Bartu Elci-Ozsoy associates Songs with the innocence of childhood and was moved to perform it at a benefit concert he organised in aid of the children affected by the devastating earthquake in his native Turkey and Syria in early 2023.
The Korean soprano Sumi Jo recorded it in honour of her mother and presented it to her a year before she died in gratitude for her determination to see her daughter become a professional singer.
When The Scotsman newspaper commissioned a series of lockdown concerts in Spring 2020 cellist Sua-Lee chose to recreate the concert by Beatrice Harrison a century earlier when she played the piece accompanied by nightingales in her garden in Surrey. Sua set up her cello in woodland near her home in Grantown- on-Spey and performed Songs My Mother Taught Me to a collection of woodland creatures
Singer Ruby Hughes performed the American composer Charles Ives' version of the piece for a collection called Bright Travellers - music curated and composed by Helen Grimes from poems by Fiona Benson. Ives wrote his own version of Dvorak's piece not long after the Czech composer had settled in America. She loves the rocking gentle lullaby sensation created by the lilting melodies of both Ives' and Dvorak's compositions.
Featuring additional recordings by Sua Lee and Zoe Challenor
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