Stratford, the swans on the Avon
(Private Collection)

SCHWANENGESANG

Remembering that E.M. Forster (St. John’s, Cambridge, Nobel Prize) expressed the belief that "music is the deepest of the arts" and contrasting the Schwanengesang of the Salzburger Festspiele 1956 (Fisher-Dieskau / Gerald Moore) with Monsegur Vaillant’s Schwanengesang (ADG Paris, 2006, where the artist - in the best Schubertian elegance – sings and is her own accompanist), perhaps one might better apprehend why Goethe preferred Zelter to Schubert, utterly assured that Zelter’s song-settings would go on making music the menial abigail of poetry, a choice obviously aloof from Shakespeare’s timid prayer :

"O ! Stay and hear ; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low…" (Twelfth Night)

the "Swan of the Avon" thus enforcing the tradition of "true love" (fin’amors) such as sung by the mediaeval poets of the Oc language, and such as unravelled, in our time, by L.T.Topsfield (St. Cath’s, Cambridge, Troubadours and Love, 1975) and Claude d’Esplas (MHRA, Cambridge, Tristan and Isolt, IMA Press, Moscow, 1994) who, last but not the least, sails over the incommensurable oceans of the Mephistophelian "trobar clus" of our Universe (Stephen Hawking’s courtesy).

CLAUDE D'ESPLAS - The Music Lesson
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