The Longing Lab Columbia Professor Walter Frisch on the musical language of longing
Episode 36 Columbia University Professor of Music Walter Frisch explores how longing is expressed in 19th and 20th-century music, particularly in the works of composers like Schumann, Wagner, and Arlen. Frisch also shares the lesser-known historic details on the development of the iconic song of longing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."
Walter Frisch is the H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has lectured on music throughout the United States, and in England, France, Spain, Germany, and China. Frisch is a specialist in the music of composers from the Austro-German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in American popular song. His books include German Modernism: Music and the Arts (2005), Music in the Nineteenth Century (2012), Arlen and Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” (2017), and Harold Arlen and His Songs (2024). He is currently working on a book about the classic French film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Frisch has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Learn more about Frisch at: https://music.columbia.edu/bios/walter-frisch
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:
*How Robert Schumann’s infatuation for pianist Clara Wieck inspired his music composition
*The unresolved harmony in Richard Wagner’s Opera Tristan and Isolde
*How Henri Berlioz’s object of longing, Irish actress Harriet Smithson, inspired his piece Symphonie Fantastique
*Terms of longing used in music composition like “vague de passion"
*Why “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost got cut from the movie The Wizard of Oz
*How Harold Arlen composed the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
*Why MGM hoped “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” would outshine Disney’s “Someday My Prince Will Come”—both known as an “I want” song in musical parlance
*How “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” made it out of MGM and was recorded and released (1938) before The Wizard of Oz (1939) by big band singer Bea Wain
*What the song meant to Judy Garland throughout her life
*The introduction to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that is often not sung
Quotes
“Sometimes we call it dissonance and consonance, or things that are unstable and stable, and very often, that pattern can sort of be linked to, or feel like it's connected to longing, a state of tension that longs for resolution."
“There's a melody [on top of this Tristan chord] that creeps upward in very small intervals, and it seems to be going somewhere, but not quite getting there…So that becomes part of this musical language of longing.”
“Wagner's view of longing and passion was influenced by the philosopher Schopenhauer, who, in turn, was influenced by Buddhism. There is this sense (that) you can never really overcome the suffering within this world. It's only in another world or in another sphere that you can find satisfaction.”
“In the middle section of the song, called a bridge, where Dorothy sings, “That's where you'll find me,” and before she goes back to the opening melody, on “find” that chord is the most dissonant, most kind of unresolved chord in the song, at the moment of greatest tension, so sort of like Schumann or Wagner.”
“The two composers that I've written the most about are Brahms from the 19th century and Harold Arlen from the 20th century. They never knew each other. They were totally different kinds of people. But in both their music, there is a sense of longing and yearning, even melancholy….it really speaks to me.”