Songbooks

When I was young we had a couple of old songbooks that went back to pre-World War II times, when my parents were young!  They had stuff like "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" and "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard." (One of them I think we still have.) There were also titles like "She May Have Seen Better Days" and the barber-shop quartet "She Was Happy Till She Met You." (My mother remembered millions of those songs!)

Several of us played the piano in my family.  We also had books like Everyone's Favorite Gilbert and Sullivan and one with all the songs from Mary Poppins, which I memorized.

In recent years I took some solo singing lessons from Giuseppe--classical and opera stuff.  I'd go to his house in Scarborough, where he's lived since coming to Canada in the 1950s.  He has a fancy garden with speakers that play opera music, and an indoor fountain!  So I bought some new songbooks with songs in Italian and French and German.

German's a surprisingly difficult language, considering how close it is to English.  I did the Schubert song "Wohin?" (German for "Where to?"), about a "Bachlein," which is German for brooklet.  The original Bach (brook) has a female gender, but the "-lein" suffix means that Bachlein is neuter in some ways, but stays female in others.  So you get a line that literally means, "It's singing of water fairies beneath her depths"!