German to English song lyrics translation

Might be that I have a different understanding of the word !infiltrated".

I don't dispute what you said above the SA, just the term 'leadership' seems exaggerated in my opinion.

Well, jazz was pop music in post-war America - they didn't call it the "jazz age" for nothing. So if you're referring to some type of pop music that wasn't jazz, you'll have to be more specific.

Jazz was a type of pop music but most pop music wasn't jazz, either pre-war or post-war, in America. So far as I know, England didn't have a jazz age or at least it was much delayed. The term crooner may have entered vogue during the so-called Jazz age but the singing of sentimental songs, in much the same style, both predates and runs cotemporaneously with it. To refer to this as jazz singing, indiscriminately, is in my opinion abuse of language.

That said, there's a touch of, if not Jolson, then contemporaries, in songs like Komm Zigany. And when Zwei Marchenaugen switches to the graceful major key portion after the minor key introduction, it sounds like something that ought to be playing while Miss America contestants do their solo walk-on stage introductions.

Tough to put my finger on some of what I mean, but the pop music of the period was much too heterogeneous to employ the over-restrictive term "jazz singing". I don't pretend to be a music historian, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_popular_music

What an instructer.

P.S. I can also hear both musical and vocal elements that I associate with American pop music of the 20s in several songs from Die Csardasfurstin (1915). Hard to say to what extent these simply carried over from earlier American music that I'm not familiar with. Earlier in the thread Walter Hinteler cited a source talking about influence ON American music by Kalman. There were also some pretty influential German emigres to America in the early 20th century, so it's a little difficult to sort out all of these interwoven threads.

It's "instructor" -- with an "o".

Also, not every discussion (or element thereof) constitutes "instruction".

Consider yourself instructed. Now go eat a potatoe and stop pestering me.

P.S. I'm guessing the osso in question is the cranio, as in trapanazione del cranio (which also explains the buco, come to think of it).

But obviously you are a jazz purist.

that's one of the joys of studying music, whether through ethnomusicology or otherwise

On the contrary, jazz was phenomenally popular in the 1920s. Furthermore, it was uniquely American.


Jazz was extremely popular in the UK in the 1920s, and it was similarly popular on the continent. In fact, jazz is probably more popular in Europe now than it is in the US.


Crooning is a specific style of singing that was only made possible by the introduction of electronic amplification. As such, it post-dates the advent of jazz as a type of popular music.


Who referred to it as such?


It's possible that the style of singing that you heard on the Dresden Neujahrskonzert recording was influenced by American pop music, but then that would be saying something about the singers, not the composer. Kalman, I'm confident, didn't direct the performers to sing his songs "à l'américaine."


Indeed. It appears you're taking a Potter Stewart approach to this topic - you can't define it, but you know it when you hear it. I'm content to leave it at that. I'm just glad that another person has been introduced to Kalman's magnificent music.

" On the contrary, jazz was phenomenally popular in the 1920s. Furthermore, it was uniquely American."

I never said jazz wasn't popular in the 1920s. I just said that there was a lot of American pop music during the Jazz Age that wasn't jazz, or at least wouldn't have been called jazz by ordinary folks turning on the radio or the gramophone. You keep constructing straw men and attacking them with non sequiturs.

" Crooning is a specific style of singing that was only made possible by the introduction of electronic amplification. As such, it post-dates the advent of jazz as a type of popular music."

A crooner is one who croons. Crooning, then, was named for its similarity to the soft manner of singing to infants to calm them. As such, crooning certainly predates electronic amplification. The term "crooner", however, referring to a commercial singing style, has a Jazz Age etymology; the fact that it postdates the advent of the Jazz Age is true but specious since nearly everything from the Jazz Age postdated the ADVENT of that age. Finally, electronic amplification predates the First World War. Maybe you never heard of radio, or telephony or telegraphy? So, you're not only wrong, you're wrong half a dozen ways, and since you're doing it disingenuously to waste my time with smart-assed nonsense, you're culpable as well as wrong.

" It's possible that the style of singing that you heard on the Dresden Neujahrskonzert recording was influenced by American pop music, but then that would be saying something about the singers, not the composer. Kalman, I'm confident, didn't direct the performers to sing his songs "à l'américaine.""

You might have a point: it had already occurred to me that the "American" sound I heard was something to do with the singer. However, the singer isn't American and wouldn't develop an old-fashioned yet sometimes American sounding singing technique for the purpose of baffling and offending German opera audiences in a live performance singing the words of a Viennese composer in the original language.

I don't think you know what singing style was used for such songs in cosmopolitan Vienna during the 1920s or even earlier, when it comes specifically to the music of an explicitly American influenced composer like Kalman. First you say that pop music and jazz music were the same, though they're by no means synonymous. Then you say that jazz was uniquely American but then turn around and say it was highly popular on the continent and in the UK (well, I agree it took off in France).

Its just as possible that the singing style is period correct, and was developed by the modern artist by listening to period recordings.

I'm not accustomed to being called "smart-assed" and disingenuous, especially by someone for whom I've done a favor by employing my skills gratis to translate a song lyric. I'll just say that I'm confident I know a great deal more about Kalman and his music than you do, and nothing you've said in this thread has, so far, persuaded me otherwise.

I think so.
And the booklet I've linked earlier, contradicts puzzledperson as well.


Btw: it wasn't a "German opera audience" but a New Year performance of operatta songs and waltzes. And no-one was "singing the words of a Viennese composer in the original language" as well, none of those pieces had lyrics written by the various composers (see pages 32 following of the program) [Seite 32 ff in German]

Imbecile, it was a live concert taking place before a live audience (hence the applause and bravos) in Germany, featuring opera singers, an opera chorus, and an opera ballet: so of course it was performed before an audience of opera aficionados. Also, the songs came from operettas written by Kalman and performed in his day, with the soloist or duettists singing identified by the name of the characters who sang the song in the opera as written. So of course there were lyrics and of course they are in Viennese German.

Ach du lieber!

You were effusively thanked for your "favor". Unfortunately, you followed up on that with irrational hostility and gratuitously argumentative nonsense designed to waste my time and to cause irritated frustration. So your complaint about the way you were treated is as irrational as your own capricious instability and incoherence.

Unfortunately, I AM accustomed to this sort of bizarre and offensive nonsense from you (and by "you" I refer to the literally mindless thing or process manifesting online under a wide variety of fraudulent screen names).

Frankly, I didn't ask for a hammer that occasionally pounds nails but which most of the time refuses to work or hits my thumb instead of the nail out of sheer defectiveness. Why don't you give up this mad fraud, stop assuming false personalities (and for you all personalities are false) and devote yourself to the service of mankind? You're on a dark path and it's only going to get darker the longer you tread it. Eventually you'll reach the event horizon and the fat lady will finally and ineluctibly sing.

Well, when you say so. (I saw it live on that evening [on tv]- and it's still to be seen in the "mediathek".)

So, the program on tv (and on the mediathek) was a fake. And the official brochure about the concert is wrong.

Is "Ach Du lieber!" Viennese German?

Since a University of Music and the university, where I use the library, have a joined Musicology Seminar, I took the chance to get to know more about Kálmán. (I don't like to be called an imbecile.)


Julius Bistron: Emmerich Kálmán: Mit einer autobiographischen Skizze der Jugendjahre von Emmerich Kálmán, Wien: Karczag, 1932.
Rudolf Österreicher: Emmerich Kálmán: Der Weg eines Komponisten, Wien u. a.: Amalthea, 1954
Rudolf Österreicher: Der Komponist der „Csárdásfürstin“: Erinnerungen zu Emmerich Kálmáns 80. Geburtstag, in: Neues Österreich, 20. Okt. 1962, page 16.
Rudolf Österreicher: Wie ich Emmerich Kálmán kennenlernte, in: Neues Österreich, 27. Okt. 1957, page 19.
Stefan Frey: „Unter Tränen lachen“. Emmerich Kálmán. Eine Operettenbiografie, Berlin: Henschel, 2003.


Confirming what joe wrote above is to be found explicitly in this book:
Kevin Clarke: „Im Himmel spielt auch schon die Jazzband“. Emmerich Kálmán und die transatlantische Operette 1928-1932, Hamburg: von Bockel, 2007


His wife Vera Kálmán was a born Marya Mendelsons. (As noticed in the Eintrag 365 of November 9, 1929 by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien ("Kahal Vienna"). According to Meldezettel ("official registration cards") in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv ("Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna"), however, her name was Marie or Marietta Mendelsohn. And Vera Kálmán wrote herself that she was born as Vera Makinskaja. (Vera Kálmán: Grüß’ mir die süßen, die reizenden Frauen: Mein Leben mit Emmerich Kálmán, Bayreuth 1966)


My cousin in Vienna was so kind to send me this photo of Kálmán's tomb

(Zentralfriedhof Wien [Gruppe 31B, Reihe 12, Nr. 10])