A Dulcet Melody
A melody is truly great when it can grab you with only the simplest accompaniment. Indeed, a great melody makes you want only the simplest accompaniment. We could make a list of the great melodies of all time, but the list would be filled with clichés -- those melodies sunk so deep into the popular awareness, we can hardly hear them anymore. Here's a better list: simple melodies that are great, but have escaped so far the attention they deserve.
My nominee is An den Mond, D. 259 by Franz Schubert. Lieder aficionados know it, but not the wider public. If you are a chord progression geek like me, listen for the mid-song transition from the candence-ending dominant chord to a sub-dominant. to start the next phrase. Am I nuts, or is that mind-blowing? Or both?
Matthias Goerne renders An den Mond well, in the optimal key. My only regret is his failure to savor the notes by means of a slower tempo -- that's a common problem with this song. Still, it's a delicious performance. Taste and see.
Let's have your nominations.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
3 Comments:
OK, I'm not sure I understand the criteria, but I'll play....
There's a brief tune in Ravel's opera L'enfant et les Sortilèges where the little boy sings to the Princess "Toi, le coeur de la rose...". (Rehearsal 73 in the Durand score.)
The tune is almost entirely repeated notes, accompanied by three solo violins playing block quarter-note chords. Twenty bars of pure loveliness.
(But, really, just drop the needle anywhere in that piece.)
there is a passage, without accompaniment in Pelleas and Mellisande that grabs me every time i hear it. Just one line, so elegant.
I think both Debussy and Ravel are filled with moments of intense melody that is heard no where else. (the middle movement of debussy's Second set of Images has a tune which is so simple and elegant, its painfully beautiful)
Satie wrote one obscure work filled with an incredible melody- Les Oiseaux.
I would also nominate Prokofiev- the middle movement of his third concerto for piano has this one chromatic melody with little harmonic backing that is just sublime. it makes me melt. (that one is kinda famous.... sorta, but still, underrated!)
"Love in Her Eyes Sits Playing," a tenor aria from Handel's masque, "Acis and Galetea." Sumptuous. Sensual. Sex made sound.
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