Broken Love

Last week, we explored samples of art focusing on domestic and passionate love. Even today, audiences clamor for portraits of passionate amour (French for love). Passion promises a great deal. All too often, it leaves destruction in its wake. The arts of many cultures probe the distress left behind by passion’s betrayal. Consider this satirical portrait of a an apparently loving couple by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Notice the title. What is Cranach revealing to us? Notice the hands!

Lukas Cranach, the elder. (1531). The Uneven Couple. Tempera on Beech.	Bernini. (1622-1624) of Daphne’s transformation. Marble.

As we will see next week, the 14th Century Renaissance was driven by wide distribution in Europe of a rich trove of classical—Greek and Latin—learning preserved by Arabs and Orthodox monks. Patronized by private wealth, Renaissance artists began to focus their work on Greco-Roman myths. The trend became especially strong in the ensuing Baroque period. In the early 17th Century, the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini dramatized the climactic moment in a characteristically heart-breaking tale of passion’s destructiveness.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

To make sense out of a great deal of post-Renaissance European art, one must know one’s classical myths, especially the Metamorphoses, in which the 1st Century Roman poet Ovid translated a range of tales from Greek myth. Although the Roman Empire had absorbed Greece, the Romans channeled Greek culture as their own. The word Metamorphosis means transformation, and the tales in the collection dramatize miraculous moments of human transformation. Their characters are beautiful mortals and quasi human, Greco-Roman gods and demi-gods driven by obsessive, destructive sexual passions. In our selected tale, Phoebus, the Sun God, known to the Greeks as Apollo, is stricken with love for Daphne, a semi-divine naiad, or wood nymph. Things do not go well.

Gentileschi, Artemisia.(c.1640-5). David and Bathsheba. Oil on canvas.

Torch Songs

It is difficult to empathize with the frustration felt by Ovid’s Phoebus lusting after Daphne or King David’s power play against a married woman. But the all too common outcome of passion, invoked over the centuries by many artists, is the heartbreak of unrequited love. In American popular music, the term Torch Song designates a tune in which a lover agonizes over betrayal and loss:

About now, however, you should be in a position to track the poetic structures of the songs. Our old friends, Parallelism, Anaphora, and sheer poetic repetition are here. But notice also the Rhyme Schemes and Trimeter beats in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The patterns are looser in “Someone like You,” but don’t miss the occasional rhymes that provide thematic emphasis.

African American Heartbreak

The American songbook has been deeply influenced by African American musical and literary traditions. Early American folklore and songs blended Euro-American idioms with the rhythms of Africans forcibly imported as slaves. By the early 20th Century, African American music was beginning to establish an astonishing level of influence over all of American pop music. Not surprisingly, the music of a people enslaved and then denied full citizenship is full of heartbreak.

Singin’ Da Blues

African American musicians, as slaves and as “freedmen”[1] developed three traditions of startlingly innovative composition. “Negro spirituals” were sung in churches and on concert stages around the world. Jazz music was developed to entertain patrons of brothels and evolved into a transcendent form brilliantly wedding individual expression with mutually supportive partnership. And the Blues were sung to ease the breaking heart:

[1] Freedmen: the term used after the Civil War for slaves liberated by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like Hebrew verse, a blues stanza uses repetition for emphasis, memory, and developing elucidation. Line 2 more or less repeats line 1. Line 3 takes things further. And line 4 resolves the tension. In this case, the stanza carries the repetition over 4 rather than 2 lines. Repeated blues lines linger like the throbbing pulses of heartbreak.

Ballad of Lost Love

Last week, we sampled the traditional English ballad, a story-song of a heart often broken by grief over a deceased lover. Anonymous folk ballads were sung and modified by countless bards over centuries. African American musicians developed their own ballad tradition, one steeped in violence to reflect the violent world Black people have long inhabited.

In 1899, a woman named Frankie Baker shot and killed her unfaithful lover, Allen Britt, in St. Louis. Within a year, the ballad “Frankie Killed Allen” had been composed by Bill Dooley and published by Hughie Cannon. More popularly titled “Frankie and Johnny,” the song has been sung by scores of artists and dramatized in several films (Frankie and Johnny). Thus, although there was an original publication, there is no authoritative version of the lyrics. All, however, share variants of the haunting refrain that speaks for millions of women in many ages and cultures: “He was my man, and he done me wrong.” The 1929 version by Mississippi John Hurt shines as an engaging example of Delta-style Blues. Here is Hurt’s version of the ballad.

The Spent Passions of Crazy Jane

In his later years, William Butler Yeats’ composed spare, hard-hitting verse that packed the punch of both disillusionment and wisdom, doubt and enduring hope.  In 1932, Yeats published Words for Music Perhaps, exploring the link between literary verse and song lyrics. In that collection, he composed a series of poems expressing the jaded life view of Crazy Jane, a woman who has walked the path of life from passionate youth to sterile old age. “Crazy Jane and the Bishop” is no torch song. But it profoundly probes the bitter ashes of broken love.

Can you work out the Meter of Yeats’ poem? Yes, it’s Ballad Stanza, a meter Yeats returned to again and again. Notice how each Trimeter line deftly restates or explicates the concept in the previous Tetrameter line. The Rhyme Scheme also supports the poem’s themes. Stanzas are defined by an X-A-X-A-X-A pattern and the rhymes create suggestive contrasts:

• I … DRY … STY
• CRIED … deNIED … PRIDE
• inTENT … excreMENT … RENT (i.e. torn asunder)

What do you think of these rhymed patterns? Analyzing Meter and Rhyme Schemes may seem like a tedious pedantry. But when we begin to hear these rhythms, Thematic patterns come alive.

References

Adele and Wilson, D. (2011). “Someone like You.” On 21. New York: Columbia Records. https://lyricstranslate.com/en/Adele-someone-you-lyrics.html.

Brookes, I. (2013). Torch song. In C. H. Garrett (Ed.), The Grove Dictionary of American Music. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195314281.001.0001/acref-9780195314281-e-8397.

Cranach, Lukas the elder. (1531). The Uneven Couple. [Painting]. Vienna: Museum of the Visual Arts. Retrieved from https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.bethel.edu/asset/LESSING_ART_1039789021.

Horne, L. (1955). Frankie and Johnny. On It’s Love. New York: RCA Victor Records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVHNX8SUp30.

Hurt, J. (1929). “Frankie and Johnny.” https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/27238655/Mississippi+John+Hurt.

Hurt, J. (1929). “Frankie and Johnny.” [Audio Recording]. On Beyond Patina Jazz Masters. Beyond Patina Records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtxyjOFLXSg.

Jerome, K. and Harbach, O. (1933) “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” In Roberta. https://www.lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/s/smokegetsinyoureyes.html.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. (8 CE). Daphne and Phoebus [Apollo]. I.452-524. Trans. Brookes More. Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922. Retrieved from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0028%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D452.

Vaughn, S. (1958). “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” [Audio Recording]. On No Count Sarah. Em Arcy Records. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AybhBOqyQHQ.

Yeats, William Butler. (1932). “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.”  In Words for Music, Perhaps. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43295/crazy-jane-talks-with-the-bishop.