Concert: WWCMF Tasting Music 2 — Love Songs

Tonight’s performance has been made possible by the generosity of Beth Barbre and John Mangan.

All humans the world over have two things in common. We share both the capacity to suffer and the right to be happy. Nowhere are these two states more perfectly encapsulated than in the Love Song.

In Verdi’s La Traviata, Violetta and Alfredo sing a great duet. He sings about his love for her, “the torment and delight of his heart.” He feels suffering and happiness simultaneously. She sings back that she just wants to be friends. Of course, she’s in love with him, too, but she is from a lower class. Turns out Alfredo’s meddling father— who just loves his son, and wants his daughter to have prospects— has coerced Violetta into professing a false sentiment. The lovers just want to be happy, but they suffer instead. By the time everyone comes around (and back onstage), convinced of and happy in the purity and goodness of the love between Violetta and Alfredo, Violetta’s pesky tuberculosis flares up one final time, bringing the whole affair to a tragic conclusion, brief happiness supplanted by ultimate suffering.

In a nutshell.

And that is what a Love Song is, the human condition of suffering and happiness in a nutshell. Of course, we are not an opera festival, but a chamber music festival. Therefore, we look to smaller forms, in this case, love songs in Chinese and Spanish by Bright Sheng and Joaquin Turina.