Being a Writer Helps Me Sing
(and that's been a surprise)
When I started voice lessons well before the pandemic, I didn’t understand that being a writer could be a valuable resource in my weekly lessons. Learning a song was much more than technique, the notes, the phrasing, and everything else I was discovering about voice. The words really mattered. The words, and what I made of them. As one teacher advised: “Think of the story you’re telling with each song, each phrase.”
I liked Lieder—art songs—and one of the first songs I picked was by Schumann. I definitely appreciated how it sounded, but the main attraction at first was brevity. It was only a page long, and that made me feel less anxious about studying it. I hadn’t sung in many years, and then only in a chorus, so I had lots of doubts about being able to stand on my own (my most recently published essay “Words & Music” explores that experience).
The German words of the Schumann Lied were not complicated per se; they’re taken from a poem by Heine, “Du bist wie eine Blume” (You are like a flower):
Du bist wie eine Blume,
So hold und schön und rein;
Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth
Schleicht mir in’s Herz hinein.
Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Auf’s Haupt dir legen sollt’,
Betend, daß Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.
The poem addresses someone beloved (or at least deeply admired), comparing the person to a flower that’s beautiful, pure, and lovely. When I look at you, the speaker says, melancholy creeps into my heart. He feels as if he should lay his hands on the beloved’s head and pray to God to always keep the beloved pure, etc.
I had heard the song online and thought it was beautiful, but when I read the words, some of which I had not learned in any German class because they were old-fashioned and poetic, I was a bit put off. It seemed kind of kitschy.
But the more I considered the poem apart from the music, the more engaged I became. That gesture of putting hands on someone’s head is like a benediction, and that’s amplified by praying to God that the beloved never change. It felt both lovely and sad.
And that’s when I decided that for me, this is an elegy. It’s not just about the beautiful love object, it’s a mournful recognition that praying to God, laying on of hands won’t stop time. After all, flowers bloom and die: beauty is transitory. That explained the melancholy creeping (or stealing) into the speaker’s heart.
The opening of the piano accompaniment confirmed that for me. It briefly sounds like a march before the singer joins the piano—and for me, it evoked the March of Time. This epiphany of sorts reminded me opera singer Joyce DiDonato in one of her master classes online advising a student that to understand a song or aria, you also needed to understand the accompaniment.
The poem has been set to music by many hundreds of composers, but the Schumann version was the most melodic. As a writer, I’m fond of research, so I read a lot about Schumann himself and discovered that he may have been bisexual. Does it matter? In a way, yes, because it opened up the song even more to different ways of performing it.
While I had trouble at first connecting with this song despite how taken I was by the music, once I reached an understanding of the words, the emotion followed. I’ve heard it sung many ways, but what helped me sing it my way was reading it as a writer, first of all, and not just entering the song, but letting it enter me.
(A longer version of this piece appeared in The Ekphrastic Review)
Wow! Having studied piano since I was 6, singing in a community chorus, studying the guitar, and trying to write literary fiction, i must say this was inspiring and informative. Thank you.
When songs are in a language I don't speak, I tend not to seek out the translation. I let the accompaniment and the sound of the words tell the story.