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Updated: July 13, 2025
We met at Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song, "On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly killing mock-gravity. At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that of the neighboring capital. It would be rather hard to prove this, and I must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
We know when he comes to the fire, when he comes to the Rhine. There floats to us, with the effect of a folk-song, a legend, the lament of the Rhine-nymphs for their lost gold. Sounds of warning are in the air as Siegfried approaches the Hall of the Gibichungen, but to such the hardy hero, no need to say, is fast sealed.
In a certain view, it would seem that by the fate of servitude the American negro has become the element in our own national life that alone produces true folk-song, that corresponds to the peasant and serf of Europe, the class that must find in song the refuge and solace for its loss of material joys.
These are called the folk-dancers, their object being to stimulate the love of old-time Denmark in the modern Dane, by showing him the dance, accompanied by folk-song, which his forefathers delighted in. Old-time ways the Dane of to-day is perhaps a little too ready to forget, but dance and song appeal to his northern nature.
A private of the Spanish Louisiana Regiment in a dirty uniform slouched behind the palings in front of the commandant's quarters, a quaint stone house set against the hill, with dormer windows in its curving roof, with a wide porch held by eight sturdy hewn pillars; here and there the muffled figure of a prowling Indian loitered, or a barefooted negress shuffled along by the fence crooning a folk-song.
Melody of a familiar folk-song or dance type now came in, divided into regular periods with strongly-marked rhythms. This may be seen clearly in, for example, Morley's "ballets" part-songs that could be danced to. Clear, easily understood, when once it came in it, never went out again. Its shaping power may be felt in the fugue subjects of Bach and Handel, as well as in their songs.
The folk-song represents Dagmar as urging the King with her dying breath "that Bengerd, my lord, that base bad dame you never to wife will take." Bengerd, or Berengaria, was a Portuguese princess whom Valdemar married in spite of the warning, two years later. As the people had loved the fair Dagmar, so they hated the proud Southern beauty, whether with reason or not.
In the reprise the folk-song appears in the tonic minor, taken most unconventionally in the bass under elaborate arpeggiations in the right hand. The coda, as in the other sonata, is simply a strong passage of climax. Arthur's supernatural nature doubtless suggested the second movement, with its elfin airs, its flibbertigibbet virtuosity, and its magic of color.
Just a phrase, a stormy phrase, from an Italian folk-song which he had heard her sing to his mother. He caught the usual words "morte" "amore." They were the staple of all her songs; to tell the truth he was often bored by them. But the harsh, penetrating note as though it were a note of anger in the sudden sound, arrested him; and when it became silent, he still thought of it.
With other nations the impulse was more natural: the racial song of the Scandinavians, Czechs and other Slavs craved a deliverance as much as the German in the time of Schubert. In France, where music had long flourished, there was no stream of suppressed folk-song. But the symphony must in the natural course have suffered from the very fulness of its own triumph.
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