When you plan a recital, not only do you have to decide what to sing, but also what will be on the printed pages you hand out. For songs in English, it is helpful to print the text. For songs in other languages, it is imperative to print their translations so that everyone in your audience will fully understand what is being sung. If you can project titles as well, so much the better.
It is very important to present good translations. They need not fit the music so well as to be singable, but the English version of each song needs to convey the meaning of the poem accurately, using words that evoke its era and mood. If you have the time and the inclination, you can probably translate each piece well yourself, and eventually, you might want to post your work on the Internet for others to use. There are some websites that can aid you in your work, among them Anna Mazzoldi’s collection of resources for translators: http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/lang/index.html. Anna works with Italian and English, but she provides links to sites that will help you with other languages as well.
If, however, you are a busy singer with a time-consuming day job, you might prefer to use existing translations wherever possible. The number one resource for song texts both in their original languages and in English is Emily Ezust’s incredibly helpful website found at www.recmusic.org/lieder and at www.lieder.net. It contains an enormous number of song texts deemed to be in the public domain, and many of them are translated, either by Emily or by volunteers. On the “copyright” page of the website Emily gives permission to use her translations for student recitals provided the following credit is given: “Translated by Emily Ezust, from The Lied and Song Texts Page, http://www.lieder.net/.” She also gives all the information that you will need to ask for permission from the other translators.
Here is how this website came into being: In May, 1995, Emily, who was then a graduate student in computer science at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, began to put a site together which would feature texts and translations of her favorite songs. Soon requests for other texts began to pour in, and Emily, who lived near a music library, widened the repertoire.
As time went on, she finished her courses and took a full time job, so she cut back on her website duties. Volunteers, realizing the value of the resource she had been building, stepped to help continue and enlarge it. Thus, the site now contains the texts to some 15,000 songs in 30 languages, and it is completely non-profit with no annoying advertising.
Some time ago Emily received a letter warning of possible legal action which grew out of a misunderstanding. The sender of the letter thought she was about to post copyrighted material, because a volunteer had asked for permission. In fact, since the permission was not forthcoming, there was no chance that the material would have been posted, but the threat of legal action on a non-profit site dedicated to texts in the public domain was frightening, to say the least.
Emily, therefore, took the site down and removed approximately 5000 texts in order to have their copyrights researched. As of today, some 2000 of them are back up with more certainty that they are no longer under copyright, the research having been done by capable volunteers. You know the old saying: No good deed goes unpunished!
What we can learn from this event is that copyright holders are beginning to guard their right to a fee for the use of their material much more carefully than they once did. Be sure you ask and get permission in writing before using any copyrighted material in your recital.
There are other sites providing texts and translations that you might also want to visit. For example, Lieder Links, www.gopera. com/lieder/links.html, has an enormous amount of information on Schubert’s Der Winterreise. Another useful page is “Ihr Lieder, Ihr meine gute Lieder” www.library.umass.edu/subject/music/heine, which is devoted to the poetry of Heinrich Heine in both the original and in translation if it is available. It also lists all the composers that have set each poem to music.
Zemerl, a site dedicated to Jewish song texts and their translations, is found at www.princeton.edu/zemerl. John Koopman’s “Unsung Songs,” www.lawrence.edu/fac/koopmajo, concentrates on beautiful but seldom sung pieces, some by well-known composers. It is maintained by a professor emeritus of music at Lawrence University’s conservatory of music in Appleton, WI. Although there is no e-mail address on the site, Professor Koopman is allowing our readers to contact him at operaviewer@hotmail.com.
None of the last group of sites has any copyright information readily available, so it is up to you to ascertain what permissions are necessary. The US government Copyright Office sites www.copyright.gov/circs /circ1.html and www.loc.gov/copyright /circs/circ22.html are helpful in this regard, but much of the best material for our purposes is on Emily’s site at www.recmusic.org/ lieder/chh.html.
In conclusion, I urge you to be sure to get permission in writing before you use any copyrighted material in a recital. It’s time consuming but absolutely necessary. After all, you want credit for your hard work, so it is not hard to understand that the writer and the translator do, too. If you perform the work before a small audience, you may not have to pay a fee, but you will need to credit the writer in a manner similar to that requested by Emily. Only after you have gotten permission and credited the writers properly can you present your recital with no legal worries.
