Sisters, Mothers, and Daughters

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

I remember asking my German diction teacher why it was acceptable for women to sing songs intended for men, but not vice-versa. After all, Christa Ludwig and Lotte Lehmann sang Die Winterreise, but not even the voracious Fischer-Dieskau had attempted Frauenliebe und Leben or “Lied der Braut” (“The Bride’s Song”). She replied, “Well, almost all art songs are about men, and if we women want to build a program we simply have to appropriate their music.” I accepted this observation as truth until I began to know the repertoire better, and found that there were many songs about women, and from many countries. Art song started out as a kind of house music – even Richard Strauss, who brought the song into the complex, ornate musical world of his operas, wrote Lieder for his wife and himself to perform together. It’s no surprise that home life and the women who take care of the home – and each other – are often the concern of song.

In exploring music for this evening, we planned on uncovering a treasure trove of song by women about women, but we found that most of the songs by women composers were about romance, exotic locales, and emotional states. The era of sisterhood in song is apparently a pretty recent thing, especially in popular music – think of Joan Baez, Helen Reddy, and k.d. lang, It’s the male composers, with their (mostly) male poets, who have created literature of sisters, mothers, and daughters. But in compensation, we’ll be hearing from a pair of closely bonded sister composers, Nadia and Lili Boulanger.

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