I just love this stuff

An email exchange with The English Guy riffing off the “Seven Songs” meme pool game led me to recall one of my very favorite voices—not that it took much. heh. Anyway, Rich, The English Guy, reminded me of his preference for Mozart over Beethoven, which popped this into my mind’s ear:

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute]

Now, I’m not a huge opera fan, although arias and chorus pieces and instrumental preludes, interludes & etc., all find their way to my listening from various operas pretty regularly. But of all the operas I’ve been exposed to or associated with in the past, Die Zauberflöte is one I could sit through very gladly. Mozart at his light-hearted best, IMO. And listening to a recording directed by Karl Böhm with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing the Papageno role? Ah, I could listen to that for hours. Just the single finest lyric baritone voice ever recorded, IMO. Even in the very brief excerpt linked (no, not posted here) below, the wonderful quality of his voice shines. *sigh*

And when Fischer-Dieskau sings lieder, ya get a chance to hear what Schubert or Schumann must really have been hearing in their own minds’ ears.

Just awesomely good stuff.

And reading Romeocat’s songlist (see below), reminded me of this, which, although it’s at too slow a tempo for regular use and I dislike some of the vowell choices, is nevertheless a beautiful and moving performance of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (NETTLETON)… and reminds me yet again what a culturally subliterate society we’ve become.

What? Yep. The second verse of the song starts, “Here I raise mine Ebenezer/Hither by Thy help I’m come… ” which many churches are removing or modifying because… well, almost nobody has the foggiest idea what that means.

*sigh* For the darker side,

When Robert Robinson wrote the words, they evoked a powerful message, because the people who would be singing it were very familiar with one of the foundation stones of Western Civilization, the Bible, and would readily identify the historical/literary allusion to 1 Samuel 7:12. Sunday School kids, “back the day,” learned the story, so at least church folk back then reteined a connection to the wealth of the allusion: a monument, an altar raised in recognition of a great victory over impossible odds gifted to the Israelites by their God.

but memes like that with power to evoke great images are dying out in our culture today.

How many of us have heard things like “The leopard can’t change his spots”?

It’s a corruption of “the leper can’t change his spots” referring to the powerlessness of individuals to overcome a dread disease without outside intervention. The corrupted version lacks the power and depth of meaning in the original, but pejoration of memes as well as individual words is a hallmark of post-postmodernist culture.

Oh, there are many such examples. Pablum (and often poisoned pablum at that) that passes as “art” and entertainment and education is breeding a stultified people lacking depth. Ahhh, don’t believe me. Read Fred’s rants (Here, too., which includes,

Thus wretched grammar is now a sign of “authenticity,” whatever that might mean, rather than of defective studies. Thus the solemnity with which rap “music” is taken. Briefly the sound of the black ghetto, it is now around the world the heraldic emblem of the angry unwashed. Thus the degradation of the schools: It is easier to declare oneself educated than to actually become so, and the half-literate now had the power to have themselves so declared.).

I’m going back to listening to some good music.