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RosieG

Are there any songs that always being tears to your eyes when you hear them? Not sad tears but well wistful or melancholy tears?

For me there are four I can think of offhand

Amazing Grace
Look to the Rainbow (from Finian's Rainbow)
Send in the Clowns (from A Little Night Music)
For all we know we may never meet again


Oh. And Sting sang a song long ago

The Russians Love Their Children Too

I think that was the name of it but it was very long ago

It wasn't that I teared up as much as I thought song was very beautiful

Posted - January 9, 2021
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Responses


  • 3719
    Quite a few but not all of them are songs.

    Who Knows Where The Time Goes     - but it has to be the original, sung by its composer, Sandy Denny, with Fairport Convention. I've not heard a good cover version, though there may be some.

    Vocalise - by Rachmaninov. A piece for soprano or high tenor with solo accompaniment, it does not have discrete words, just long, single vowel sounds, usually "Aaaaaa". It has been arranged also for various solo, duet or trio instrumental-only versions. The title with a small 'v' is the term for the style.

    Four Last Songs - Richard Strauss. I don't hear them often, so tend to confuse them with...

    .... the Lieberstod - Richard Wagner, from his opera Tristan und Isolde. It is Isolde who sings it, I think as she is dying, as the aria (meaning Love [in] Death), but I don't know the story beyond that aria confirming the couple's love in life and death.   

    Also from Wagner - the finale aria (Brunnhilde's) of Gotterdammerung, and the music that continues from her last words, through fire and flood, to an extraordinarily poignant passage as she is redeemed and peace finally settles over the world. Hers are not quite the last words of the operatic tetralogy though, when performed in full. As the tragic Valkyrie ends the song and flings herself onto Siegfried's funeral pyre, in a very brief moment one of the villains utters a final despairing yell of "Don't touch the ring!" all suddenly see is still on Siegfried's finger. Too late though, as the pyre blazing up then the River Rhine flooding, sweep away all the corruption the story has described. I heard this song only yesterday in concert performance, preceded as if in symphonic movements, by two other powerful, all-instrumental extracts:  Siegfried's Dawn Ride, then his funeral march, and that line was omitted. (Wagner adapted the ride music from his pastorale, Siegfried's Idyll, a birthday present to his wife and referring to a real Siegfried, their son.)

    Lark Ascending - Ralph Vaughan Williams. (His name is often pronounced "Rafe", but I don't know if that's what he went by.) Principally for solo violin, after the orchestral central section, the violin is alone again as the lark has the last word, fading away skywards.

    Curiously too, sometimes traditional folk, especially English dance, music - curiously because this is joyful, not melancholic; but the lachrymose quality for me is by the music's associations, not the music itself. 


    ++++

    Of your list, I can find Amazing Grace a charming if slightly syrupy hymn but only if at a dignified, not rushed or dragging, tempo.  I've heard recordings of it being sung at funerals, but so slowly that though the mourning is no doubt sincere, the singing takes the hymn beyond dirge and into parody.

    Similarly, You'll Never Walk Alone sometimes suffers from being turned into an excessive dirge, but I've heard recordings of it by the "massed choir" of Liverpool Football Club fans using it as their anthem at their home ground, and though I am not a sports fan, it is as stirring and moving a sound as a Welsh rugby crowd's Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers), or very differently in mood and context, a Scots pipe lament.

    Send In The Clowns does not  move me particularly, but I can appreciate it if sung well. The last version I heard was dire! Of songs from the musicals the one that does touch me is Midnight, from Cats. 



    X
      January 9, 2021 5:45 PM MST
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  • 113301
    Wow. Thank you for your very comprehensive answer. A Wagmer fan eh? Takes me back decades ago. I was in my early 20's and worked in a research lab with a bunch of genius scientists. My job was to correct the spelling of their output. Most of them couldn't spell worth a dam*. One particular scientist and I got into a "difference of opinion" discussion. He was quite condescending supercilious and insufferable. Some geniuses are like that. He waxed poetic about WAGNER and how superior the music was. I am a fan of lyrical music. My very favorite piece of classical music is the 1812 Overture because it encompasses all range of emotion. Especially when real cannons are used in the appropriate places. "Syrupy"? My brother-in-law is now 83. For his 50th birthday my sister and I gave him a swinging party. All the kids (adults by then) showed up. It was a great day and at the end of it he got his guitar and started playing AMAZING GRACE. Out of the blue. He is not a demonstrative guy emotionally nor is he particularly religious. But something prompted him to start playing and ALL of us just started singing. It is moment in my life that I treasure. "Syrupy"? Different strokes Durdle. As for Send in the Clowns....the lyrics are haunting and true to life. Missed opportunities. Bad timing. That is the point of it. Missed opportunities and bad timing. What we see and hear is unique to our character intellect temperament and experiences. Sometimes we can relate and sometimes we can't. Thank you for your reply and Happy Sunday to thee and thine. This post was edited by RosieG at January 10, 2021 1:40 AM MST
      January 10, 2021 1:38 AM MST
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  • 3719
    I described Amazing Grace as "syrupy" perhaps because almost all renditions I have hear of it, make it syrupy! Your party rendition probably did it justice, but it is one of those songs that can be too easily be turned into mere sentimentality, as I have most often heard it.

    Oh, I agree with your description of Send In The Clowns, but I don't see any personal links so though I think it a good song,  it's just another song about someone else's lost love.

    There is one song that never applied to me but I did find credible, and that is Band of Gold - but only its original version sung by Freda Payne, because she sang it as if she had read the words carefully, and meant them. I have a copy of a cover version by Bonnie Tyler, and though I like much of Bonnie's other work, her arranger turned Band Of Gold into a parody by making it a disco number so jaunty you'd have to be careful not to play it at a wedding reception.

    Paul Robeson with Ole Man River, and Billie Holliday with Strange Fruit, do not move me in the way of your question. Instead I see them as similar first-rate matches of singer and lyrics, making the songs particularly believable and powerful -  and of course the songs do deal with real, terrible things. Robeson's voice is of controlled anger at the routine injustice and exploitation he describes; Holliday sounds more despairing than angry at the sheer mindlessness and cruelty of a lynch-mob. 

    '

    Much more cheerful, and not at all tear-jerking but also credible, is The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset - observing life and a couple in love in the sunset seen from the Waterloo Bridge, over the Thames in Central London.

    '

    Unlike your past colleague, though I see Wagner's work as outstanding and full of huge melodies, I don't regard it as necessarily "better" than any other composer's  major works - including Beethoven's very impressive 1812 Overture - because taste and objective quality are not the same things and the works are very different anyway.  It is fair to compare an individual composer's own works with each other, or with other writers in similar styles, but not to compare them with major works in different styles by others. 

    I don't know why he'd not occurred to me but I missed another from my original list: Jean Sibelius. In particular his Second Symphony, which is really what switched me on to symphonic music though I'd heard plenty, including of course, film scores. (I don't know why Sibelius turned his Christian-name from its Finnish form of 'John', to French, though.) This post was edited by Durdle at January 11, 2021 3:33 AM MST
      January 11, 2021 3:01 AM MST
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  • 113301
    Well you hurt my feelings m'dear as I expect you realized. I took it as a putdown and I'm not a fan of having friends do that to me. I think we are at least that...or perhaps pals. We usually get along. We don't always agree but who needs that? I understand that being unable to relate to a particular songs happens. Still others may find it particularly moving so putting it down seems unkind to me. By now you know I will always tell what I think. That drives some people away. You stayed so I figger how I engage doesn't bother you. You just ride it out. Anyway how are things going in the U.K.? It's dire here in Arizona whose population is under 8 million. RIGHT NOW ARIZONA leads the world in new covid cases. We in California are second on that deplorable list but our population is 40 MILLION. A good friend lives there as well as our daughter-in-law. The one whom our son who passed almost two years ago married. She is a darling girl and her mom and dad came to live with her after David passed away. Her father passed away about a month ago. From heart trouble not Covid. She's had a tough time but even so she just keeps moving ahead day by day. So far Jim and I are fine but how long that will  continue I cannot say. In California we are told that "THE WORST IS YET TO COME" and already we are told that ICU beds are full..there's not enough staff...ambulances are getting scarcer and the whole system might just crash. Then there is TRAITOR DON and his actions. And the millions of insurrectionists who adore him. Sometimes it's just too much and I get cranky and snippy. So sorry for that but I can't guarantee I won't get cranky again. I'm 83 and allowed to be cranky, right? Thank you for your reply Durdle. STAY SAFE m'dear! STAY SAFE! This post was edited by RosieG at January 11, 2021 3:14 AM MST
      January 11, 2021 3:11 AM MST
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  • 3719
    Oh, Rosie, I am sorry!

    I don't use Answermug every day so I have only just read that.

    I had no wish whatsoever to upset you, in what is after all an exchange of musical tastes. I did suggest that your party's singing of Amazing Grace was much more sincere than public performances I have heard.   

    '
    I am very sorry too, about your loss.

    I knew the pandemic is wreaking havoc in California, but I did not know it's even worse in Arizona. The John Hopkins University's world-wide tracking of the pandemic recently put the USA ahead of India as the worst-affected country, but news reports give rather blurred impressions by giving numbers of cases without always accounting for population. Even so, I know places like Los Angeles are in deep trouble.

    It's bad here in parts of the UK, though the vaccination programmes are now under way. It is patchy around the country, with the worst in the more populated areas as you'd expect, but nowhere is safe now.

    Your news about shows something we are seeing here, that the pandemic makes it easy to forget there are other illnesses. The National Health Service has both reported very long elective waiting-lists as a result of the plague, but also that many people are reluctant to seek help through fear of either catching Covid or of adding to the doctors' load. They won't, in either way, of course.

    I will keep you and Jim, and your families, in my thoughts.   
      January 16, 2021 3:39 PM MST
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  • 113301
    Well it's okay now m'dear. Your hanging in through thick and thin is something I know I can depend on. I think you always (well almost always) focus on my intention. My words don't always manifest that as well as I would lke them to. So you don't "use" Answermug every day? I do. Are there other internet social sites to which you belong? Some of my "regulars" belong to quite a few. I'm a one-man gal. I one-social site loyalist. I'm not a joiner. I'd never have investigated anything if my son had not been involved with an internet social site titled ANSWERBAG. He invited me to come for a visit and look around. I did and well I kinda liked it so I stayed. Later on he left because he had no more time to devote to it and then Answerbag left everyone in the lurch by just shutting down one day without any notice. Which really ticked me off. Had they warned us we could have exchanged email addresses with our pals. Very rude of them. Anyway some of the Answerbag folks emigrated to Answermug and I was told by an Answrbag friend who came on over that some of them were asking about me so I came on over and stayed. I can't keep up with the responses I get here so there is no way I could join any other internet social site. I don't do this one justice. Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply. Our worst is yet to come we are told. So much fun to hear that! Meanwhile we have TRAITOR DON to rid ourselves of and what he has left behind is his poop in the form of insurrectionists. Gross image I know but that's how I perceive them to be. Excrement!.:)
      January 17, 2021 1:55 AM MST
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