Mother Love
Pues andáis en las palmas,
ángeles santos,
que se duerme mi niño,
tened los ramos.

Palmas de Belén
que mueven airados
los furiosos vientos
que suenan tanto:
no le hagáis ruido,
corred más paso,
que se duerme mi niño,
tened los ramos.

El niño divino,
que está cansado
de llorar en la tierra
por su descanso,
sosegar quiere un poco
del tierno llanto.
Que se duerme mi niño,
tened los ramos.

Rigurosos yelos
le están cercando;
ya veis que no tengo
con qué guardarlo.
Ángeles divinos
que váis volando,
que se duerme mi niño,
tened los ramos.

Lope de Vega

(It's obvious that the singer is the Virgin Mary, even this is not set out explicitly.) Strange that the most wonderful poem about mother-love should have been written by a man, and then set to music by three men. (Three wise men?). And two of those men (Wolf and Brahms) were childless. Not sure about Toldrà. Has any female composer set it...?
(While we are about it, nobody ever seems to comment on the bizarre fact that Frauenlieben und Leben is a set of poems written by a man and set to music by another man!(?) I know of at least one gay tenor who would love to include it in a concert!)

I knew the Brahms setting long before I knew the Toldrà. At the end of the GUNGADIN project (in about 1981) my friend David and I (who had been working on it full blast for months) had a week off to recover and went to stay at Maurice and Marilynn's place ``at the lake'' as we used to say: Lake Mahinarangi. Maurice had an LP (then just recently released) of Janet Baker and Cecil Aronowitz and André Previn playing the two songs with viola plus the Vier Ernste Gesänge. And of course the second of the two songs with viola is a setting of the (translation into German of the) above Lope de Vega text. Maurice and Marilynn were there with Ben (their child) and David and me. The autumnal quality of the viola songs matched the autumnal weather perfectly, and we spent days on end (how many?) off our faces on Maurice's best weed (bless him) sitting among the scrub by this isolated lake in the Otago steppe (not another house for miles) listening to this wonderful music in a wonderful Otago autumn. And there is no autumn like an Otago autumn. The perfect restorative experience.

Not the least remarkable thing about this poem is the circumstance that this is the only instance i know of where Wolf set a poem also set by someone else and came off second-best. But he didn't come off second-best to Brahms: the best setting of this text is by someone I had never heard of outside this context: Eduard Toldrà. By some reckoning Wolf comes off third-best. The Toldrà setting is magic: pure magic.
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