# Favorite Languages for Vocal Music



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

In the realm of Western classical music, what are your favorite languages to hear sung?
You can select more than one language. Results are public.

My favorite is German as in Beethoven's Ninth, Choral Fantasy, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and Fidelio.


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## Rocco (Nov 25, 2013)

My two favorites are English and German. I like English for a few of my favorite works by Handel. Other than that I love the way German sounds when it's sung.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

I chose English, Latin and German, as they are the languages that I (to varying degrees) can understand. English has many of the great oratorios, Latin has an enormous range of sacred pieces, and German has the finest Lieder and some pretty good opera as well.

That said, I also have a particular fondness for the songs of Grieg, so I should also vote for Norwegian. Maybe I'll get round to studying this language one day so I can enjoy the music all the more


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Winterreisender said:


> That said, I also have a particular fondness for the songs of Grieg, so I should also vote for Norwegian. Maybe I'll get round to studying this language one day so I can enjoy the music all the more


So far the only music I have heard in Norwegian is folk and black metal, but I imagine classical lieder in this language must sound wonderful...

And for now I have voted for Wagner's operas, Schubert's lieder, and in the next line, works like Handel's Messiah.


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## DaDirkNL (Aug 26, 2013)

German and Italian. German for Schubert's songs and Italian for Le Nozze di Figaro.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

My top languages are Italian, Russian and German. I'm not very fond of English (for classical) and French and I haven't heard enough in Latin and Spanish. Whilst Italian and German are more or less obvious choices, I couldn't tell you why I like Russian (which I don't understand), but I find it compelling. Maybe it's just a dramatic language...


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

I like French. I'll actually listen all the way through an opera in French.


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## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

I love French because it has a certain "Je ne sais quoi". The most mundane phrase sounds like poetry.

I love English because I can understand it and sing along. Having said that. I do get annoyed when they don't subtitle English Opera. Sometimes it's just as difficult to understand what's going on.

I love Latin because it seems to add an extra layer of gravitas to the proceedings. Probably the fact that Requiems used to make up most of my top 10 favourite pieces is something to do with it as well.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

In classical music I much prefer that the singing convey no data beyond the datum that it _is_ language. Of those I have heard, Latin and its children Italian and Spanish have the fewest unfortunate sounds. Combinations of consonants are the usual negatives, and French has its share of them, especially when a bass is singing. The only exception I make to this preference is when Ferrier is singing Handel; she is not despised.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

MagneticGhost said:


> I love English because I can understand it and sing along. Having said that. I do get annoyed when they don't subtitle English Opera. Sometimes it's just as difficult to understand what's going on.


I hear you. (I guess I should say, I read you.)

I don't have a problem with English sacred music, but some reason, operas don't sound as good to me in English. You'd think I'd glom onto it because I can finally understand what's going on.

But on the other hand, it_ really_ irritates me when they're singing an English libretto with such affectation/vibrato that I can't understand the words. I mean, for once, the entire audience (at least in America) can follow you, and your diction is so bad that they're still lost.


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## lupinix (Jan 9, 2014)

english and russian, sometimes french


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Vietnamese. 

:tiphat:


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I chose the languages I speak, of course, as being able to understand the songs is preferable to having to follow a translation... but the truth is that singing is more often than not unintelligible, so I have to follow the text for the first few times with most things. Once I know it, like Pierrot Lunaire, for example, then I no longer require the texts and it is nice to be able to understand it. I like the sound of German in classical music, but French has a certain charm, too. Offhand, I can't think of much in English that I am especially fond of. I was concerned that some of Shostakovich's music would be less accessible to me in the Russian versions, but I have gotten used to it.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Listening to Grieg right now, the Norwegian language sounds magical!


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Every one brings something to the party but I'm interested in Slavic languages as they are driven by harder consonant sounds which lend the singing something of an earthy, percussive edge whereas the Romantic languages seem more vowel-emphasised which has a more flowing, airy effect. Maybe English is somewhere in between the two types.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

German and Latin, for several reasons, not the least of which is that they are the only ones that seem "musical" to me. They have a structure that seems to me to be music-like even when they are not set to music.


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

re: music with Latin texts. I find it a shame that the majority of pieces in Latin draw from a relatively small number of Christian texts (which can become tedious after a while), and that so few composers have attempted to set pieces of classical Latin. I was very excited when I found out that an 18th century composer by the name of F.-A. D. Philidor had written a oratorio about centennial celebrations of 17BC with Horace's _Carmen Saeculare_ as the text.









Unfortunately the music is pretty run-of-the-mill. Not sure how many other examples there are of composers who have tried this. If I were a composer, the first thing I would do would be to write an epic dramatic cantata based on Lucretius' _On the Nature of Things_!


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Winterreisender said:


> If I were a composer, the first thing I would do would be to write an epic dramatic cantata based on Lucretius' _On the Nature of Things_!


A fine choice to be sure!! My tastes would go to Virgil's _Aeneid_, though. The problem with setting classical Latin texts to music, I think, is that the Romans were such a practical and reasonable lot; unlike medieval Christians, the classical authors didn't aim for the sublime and the transcendant (concepts very well suited to classical music) but for worldly wisdom, reason, irony... well, they had love coverered, though, in poetry and drama... but even that was rather matter-of-factly, either compared to what came after (transcendant and painful courtly love) or what was before (dionysian and mad Greek love... like Sappho).


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

Xaltotun said:


> A fine choice to be sure!! My tastes would go to Virgil's _Aeneid_, though. The problem with setting classical Latin texts to music, I think, is that the Romans were such a practical and reasonable lot; unlike medieval Christians, the classical authors didn't aim for the sublime and the transcendant (concepts very well suited to classical music) but for worldly wisdom, reason, irony... well, they had love coverered, though, in poetry and drama... but even that was rather matter-of-factly, either compared to what came after (transcendant and painful courtly love) or what was before (dionysian and mad Greek love... like Sappho).


It's probably true that most classical texts are hard to detach from the political environment in which they were written. Even with the _Aeneid_, it would seem rather odd singing about the "Empire without end," given that the Empire has sort of already ended. That said, some of the smaller, more philosophical poems from Horace could make a for a rather nice song cycle. I'd even take a slightly comical song cycle based on Ovid's _Amores_!.


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## SteveSherman (Jan 9, 2014)

I voted for Italian, both to hear and to sing. Its crisp consonants and clean diphthongs let it sit perfectly in the vocal apparatus. It's not an accident that the Italians invented opera.

The languages I sing most often are (in this order) English, Latin and German. Latin has most of the advantages of Italian (especially when sung as the Italians do), English works reasonably well, but German is an utterly unmusical language. The vowels are too long, so that it's really hard not to close the throat, and the consonants follow one another like ducklings after their mother.

My favorite example of the unsingability of German is Bach's glorious motet Jesu meine Freude. After the opening chorale the first chorus begins with the text "Es ist nun nichts"--try singing that: four vowels, not one a diphthong, and for good measure three straight unvoiced consonants. It is a wonder that so many composers were able to overcome the language enough to produce an almost inexhaustible choral literature.


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