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From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Tue Oct 3, 2000  2:48 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist-temporary] Songs for Baritone for Wedding


On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Leo Morgan wrote:

> Hi Karen, where do you get the time to dig up all this info.,you are a
> treasure.
>
> you mention Greig's " I love you dear "I did that for a competition,it has a
> rather high
>
> tessitura for a baritone, the adjudicator said it sounded more like a
> frontal assault


The nice thing about weddings - unless the two people getting married are
obsessively correct musicologists - is that you can get away with all
sorts of transpositions that you can't use in competitions.

There is a low-tessitura version of the song in the FIRESIDE BOOK OF LOVE
SONGS (which is available at many public libraries). This book has a lot
of Lieder and art songs in "popular" keys, and yet with reasonably good
piano accompaniments and English translations of foreign texts (along with
the original-language texts).

Even the original, which I have in the wonderful two-volume Grieg edition
by Bradley Ellingboe, is in a key that I find quite comfortable, and I'm a
mezzo-soprano. So it follows, to me at least, that sung an octave lower
it would be the right key for a baritone.

It may be that you were working with a high-voice transposition of the
song. I've found that the original key of many of Grieg's songs are
actually "medium high", but that there are also a lot of soprano
transpositions out there (no doubt because sopranos are so common they
drive the market :) ).

Karen
-----
Ich sage euch: man muss noch Chaos in sich haben,
um einen tanzenden Stern gebaeren zu koennen.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html

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http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html


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