That this longing for you follows wherever I go?
This reference to distress is similar to Camillo’s song as it also gives a haunted image. This line suggests love is not what it seems. Two lines in the song seemed strange to me in the rhyming:
Night and day, under the hide of me,
There’s an oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me
I thought this was strange because ‘hide’ is usually associated with animals and I began to wonder whether ‘hide’ and ‘side’ were a forced rhyme. However, this could be interpreted as an animal attraction and that hungry is part of the animal inside of us. The illicit passion of the song is slightly diminished by the way the actors were placed on stage. They did not face each other and looked to the right slightly but not at the audience. This seemed very odd to me and it made them look like singers instead of lovers. I felt it would have been more passionate if they were facing each other.
Cole Porter’s I’ve Got You Under my Skin was the third song, sung by Isabella (Cassandra Cooke), Bracciano’s wife. I thought the choice of song for this was good and helped the audience to understand the situation well. We would normally associate something under the skin as being something not nice like a thorn or an itch but that causes constant irritation. This makes us think that she knows Bracciano does not love her but he is so close to her she cannot get him out. However, her next image is a more conventional meaning of love.
I’d tried so hard not to give in
I said to myself: this affair never will go so well
From her words it shows that the speaker has attempted to resist but failed and she admits defeat. The speaker shows us she has an alter ego, which speaks in the night, and lets us know she is vulnerable with the words “comes in the night”
And repeats, repeats in my ear
Don’t you know, little fool, you never can win?
Use your mentality, wake up to reality.
The alter ego is her common sense and is insistent and eventually aggressive and bossy which overwhelms the speaker. This also shows internal rhyme in the words mentality and reality. The speaker hears encouraging and discouraging sides for Bracciano; she loves him so much but she cannot have him it is an obsessive, unrequited love.
The performance is set up on stage with Bracciano sitting casually on a chair. As she sings the song to him he looks uncomfortable but shows little respect for her in his body language. I felt that this performance summed up the last few scenes and made the audience more knowledgeable.
The fourth song to be performed was Cole Porter’s Love for Sale, performed by Vittoria. She is bitterly aware that as a female, she is a victim of the system of so-called justice as she is tried in court for the murder of her husband, Camillo. The words of the song communicate the woman’s bitterness about the lack of respect for love and she thinks men see it as a commodity. In the song Cole Porter uses personification when he describes the moon:
When the moon so long has been gazing down
on the wayward ways of the wayward town
that her smile becomes a smirk.
Here the lyricist uses personification and we get the image that the moon smiling cynically at those who fall in love because it knows that humans will always find a way of ruining it. Porter also uses repetition in the words ‘wayward ways of this wayward town’, this is an indication that she is trying to get the point across, or she may be trying to set the scene of a town, which the moon is smirking at. The lyricist gives us the idea of love as food when he associates it with the adjective “Appetizing”. This emphasises the next verse:
Who would like to sample my supply?
This line sounds like a market stallholder, calling out for business. It seems she is putting on the role of being a prostitute but she knows that this is society’s view of her, not her real identity. He continues using exaggerated language, which is also typical for marketing goods:
Who’s prepared to pay the price
For a trip to paradise
Here the speaker feels ashamed, and bitter because she has sold her love and will continue to sell love because she sees herself as a prostitute and society has double standards for men and women. We are forced to ask ourselves if resentment is genuine or is Vittoria putting on an act in order to get sympathy from her jury. This is because she has doubts that Bracciano loves her. Cole Porter tries to make later lines seem more comic by using alliteration as she mocks the supposed authorities on love:
Let the poets pipe of love
This could be sung in a disparaging tone as a panpipe makes a weak fragile noise. The lyricist may have wanted this feeling because underneath the exterior, the singer is not as tough as she seems. The lyricist also wants the speaker to be confident and he makes her an authority in the following lines:
I’ve been thro’ the mill of love:
Old love, new love
Ev’ry love but true love.
These lines suggest she wears her heart on her sleeve but this is a contrast with the previous verse. She is comparing her expertise of love with the poet’s meaningless words. Porter uses the idea of a mill; my original interpretation of this was of pain, because I related the mill to a flourmill where flour is ground down. The line “Ev’ry love but true love” seemed very powerful to me. It seems that Vittoria doesn’t think that Bracciano love her and she is unsure which of two options should she take-to marry Bracciano and become a Duchess, although she knows that he doubted her so the marriage would be second rate, or to not marry Bracciano and be considered a whore.
Everything Happens To Me, by Matt Dennis and Thomas Adair was the fifth song in the play, sung by Francisco (William Tudor). He is struggling to cope with the grief of his sister, Isabella’s death. I did not think that this song worked as well as some of the others because its language was more Americanised and casual. This register of casual-conversational language does not tie in with the play or the other songs. The speaker uses slang such as “bet your life” and modern references such as ‘golf’. The speaker sounds like he lives a very trivial lifestyle and this doesn’t fit Francisco
I guess I’ll just go thro’ life catchin’ colds and missin’ trains
This is a play on words and adds to the playboy lifestyle we have already pinned to the character. The speakers mention of cards, his boasting and his use of clichés lead us to the same conclusion such as: ‘play an ace’ ‘mortgaged all my castles’ ‘looks before he jumps’
From all this evidence we cannot help but picture a flippant, frivolous man who has lost a lover. The love that the speaker describes in the song sounds like the love between two lovers rather than the love between a brother and sister. This makes the audience feel confused and even slightly disgusted. It also sounds like the speaker has just met the girl when Francisco has known his sister for as long as he remembers.
During the song, in our school production, Isabella comes on stage as a ghost. This is because Francisco is so full of grief he sees his sister. She is illuminated by a green light so that we know she is a ghost but nevertheless it seems a bit confusing. Because ‘Everything Happens’ was more twentieth century than the other songs it was the hardest to produce on stage and because of this, unfortunately, added confusion was put on the play.
The flamboyant Flamineo was the next to sing in the sixth song Jealousy by Winifred May. He sings about Bracciano’s jealousy when he believes the ‘planted’ fake love letter, suggesting Vittoria is in a liaison. Or is he singing about his own jealousy for Bracciano’s lifestyle and money? It was only looking back on this song that I thought about the latter. Could Flamineo be suffering or is he laughing about other people’s suffering? Winifred May uses a recurring motif of self blame:
I wrong’d you…
The heartaches I cost you… I’ve only got myself to blame
I know I deserve the shame…
I doubted you.
The speaker shows remorse and is deeply sorry about his jealousy. We get an image like in Love for Sale when the personification is used when the moon smiles cynically at those who fall in love because, being human, they will ruin it. May also uses personification in the line:
My crime was my blind jealousy
The speaker is again blaming himself and is saying her jealousy was blind because he could not control it or see what he was doing. The speaker also blames love itself when he criticises it in the line:
Love was a madness
This line shows the speakers feelings about love; it is doomed from the start. However, it is hard to escape from it. This line reminds me of the song I’ve Got You Under My Skin, as it is a love from which the speaker cannot escape. The lyricist also uses positive and negative images of love being like a wine:
Your magic image
Was intoxicating like wine
Drunk with such bliss
The first line is more encouraging about love being an intoxicating, exciting experience. The second line is more negative when it associates love as being drunk. This image is not as optimistic because we associate drunkenness as being out of control and dangerous.
Jealousy was the only song in the production that Miss Potts encouraged the singer to dance and move about the stage. Vittoria and Bracciano are in one corner of the stage, Vittoria is crying and Flamineo is looking over them. At this point Vittoria is afraid that, although she is in love, could Bracciano only have lust for her and the planted letter could be an excuse for him to leave her because he is jealous. This is why at first we think that the jealousy Flamineo sings of is the jealousy between Bracciano and Vittoria.
The final song, Gloomy Sunday, by Sam Lewis, is also known as the Hungarian Suicide song. It is sung by Zanche, Vittoria servant (Hannah Bradbury). She sings about the option that suicide could end her and Isabella’s suffering after Marcello’s death. The song refers to ghosts as other songs in the play have but this is not about love but about death. The lyricist produces an evocative image in the line:
Little white flowers will never awaken you.
This is a nice image because little can be associated with dainty like white is with purity. It is also sad because the dead person will never see the flowers again. The theme of sorrow continues with the lines:
Angels have no thought of ever returning you.
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you
Here the speaker is imagining a heaven where they will be reunited if she dies. This is when she considers committing suicide. She imagines the dead in the line:
Death is no dream, for in death I’m caressing you.
This is a very sensuous image but a little bizarre. There is also an element of onomatopoeia. She is again imagining them together in death and she imagines, as many of the other songs have, love is deep in her heart, this is continued in the line:
I wake and find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dear.
She is imagining that he is not really dead but just asleep in her heart. I think, however, that she thinks that he is still apart of her although his body is dead his spirit is still with her. The lyricist uses an odd clichés in the line:
I felt my heart melt when I dreamt that we were apart, far apart, far apart, far apart.
This line is odd because it is very powerful but the cliché would usually be considered corny. The speaker also uses repetition when she repeats far apart. She feels sorry for the deceased in the line:
Darling I hope that my dream never haunted you
She hopes that she did not make him feel guilty about him leaving first. This line sounds like it is a male singing about a dead female instead of a female singing for a dead male.
The play begins and ends with two very tormenting, depressing songs, however, there are some distinctive differences between the two. For instance, in Gloomy Sunday, Lazlo has made a more intense communication between the audience and the singer because of the words he uses. It sounds like the singer is very in touch with his/her emotions:
Little white flowers will
never awaken you, not where the black
coach of sorrow has taken you.
Lazlo’s poem has a different emotional quality from Solitude and here he uses strong images of colour, which give us a beautiful but sad image of death’s dark carriage taking the deceased away where nothing as pure as white can touch them and leaving sorrow where it goes. Solitude does not communicate as well and Ellington gives us negative images of the character being spoken about. When we are trying to create a clear picture about the type of person singing the song we first establish who would be singing it, there is no strong gender identification, from the lyrics, in Solitude however there is a stronger sense of a man singing about a woman in Gloomy Sunday. But, it is hard to be sure because of the words used. There is a possibility that Lazlo has deliberately blurred the singer’s identification because he wants it to focus the fact that the singer has become very in touch with his/her emotions because they have lost someone very close to them. Gloomy Sunday seems the more superior poem and is written in a more professional way. In Solitude it seems that Ellington, in some places, has forced the rhyme such as:
Nobody could be so sad…
I know that I’ll soon go mad.
This seems the less successful poem because this rhyme seems forced. Overall, the use of songs in the play seemed overall to carry the play quite well and they followed a theme of love leading to sadness. The play begins and ends with images of sadness, the opposite to love, I thought this was good and fitted the play well. Most of the songs seemed to be a good choice, which fitted in well with what was going on in the scene, this made the audience more aware of the characters feelings and emotions. So in answer to the question, was the use of twentieth century songs in a seventeenth century play a good choice? I would say yes, because although it may be criticized for carrying the weight of the plot I think it was needed because the play is difficult to understand.
