Favorite art song

Beau Soir; Claude Debussy, composer

I played for a number of vocal recitals during my time at South Dakota State University. I liked vocal recitals. After spending hours in practice rooms with instrumentalists on works that had the potential to tax the concentration level of even the most devout classical music fan, I found it refreshing to focus on a series of four- to five-minute art songs, recitatives and arias.

Vocal teacher Kristi V. liked Claude Debussy’s “Beau Soir” and had most of her students learn it. And I’m glad, because now I like that song, too. Paul Bourget wrote the original French poem. In English …

When the rivulets are rosy in the setting sun,

And a mild tremor runs over the wheat fields,

An exhortation to be happy seems to emanate from things

And rises towards the troubled heart.

A yearning to enjoy the charm of being alive

While one is young and the evening is beautiful,

For we are going on, as this stream goes on:

The stream to the sea, we to the grave.

M. Debussy was only twenty years old when he wrote the beautiful music that compliments this romantic poem.

I downloaded it so that I could share it with my first cousin-once-removed K.

Credits: To Kristi V., for bringing opera to upper Midwestern bunch. They didn’t know that they needed it until they heard it.