Shoveled snow today, because my neighbors who usually blow the stuff away are still on vacation. Nevertheless, I am unbowed. I’m reading Dean Koontz’ latest right now, so there’s no review. But it’s Friday, and that’s often a day for posting music.
Our beloved Sissel was just 15 when she sang this song on Norwegian TV. It’s a translation of a French number called ‘Hymne a l’amour,’ made popular by Edith Piaf. There is an English version, entitled, ‘If You Love Me,’ and it’s very good, but the video isn’t a live performance. So we’ll use this one. You can find the other on YouTube if you like.
Off on a tangent… Seeing the title before reading the post, I immediately thought, ‘Thomas Tallis in Norwegian?’ – having sung his ever-popular setting of John 14:15-17 in various services in a couple different choirs in the past year or so. Now, having searched unsuccessfully on YouTube for ‘Thomas Tallis in Norwegian’, I am left wondering if he (and other 16th-17th-century English composers of sacred choral music) are sung in translation ‘in the North’?
I feel confident that there are assorted English-speaking ‘Northern’ borrowings, though the only example that springs to mind is Finlandia often set to a translation of the hymn text of Katharina Von Schlegel, “Stille, mein Wille, dein Jesus hilft siegen” as “Be Still, My Soul, The Lord Is On Thy Side” (as the Psalter Hymnal Handbook tells me, quoted on the Hymnary website) – quite an ‘international project’, that, across lands and centuries, with a 19th-century Scot translating an 18th-century Lutheran.
David, I honestly don’t know the answer to this. I do know that we Norwegian-Americans have a strong tradition of sacred choral music coming out of our Lutheran colleges (St. Olaf, Luther, Concordia, etc.). I expect these pieces are represented in their repertoire, at least historically. But probably in English.