Every afternoon at four o'clock the CD starts playing. I recently loaded Richard Tauber's disk Volkslieder and the first song is Die Lorelei - Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten. . . .
It tells about a Maiden sitting on a mountain and combing her golden hair and singing a song that lets the skipper on the Rhine below forget all about himself and his boat crashes on the rocks.
It is a tale like Homer's Odyssey, the Sirens, and many other folk tales - always beautiful women luring honest working men to their doom through their enchanting music, singing, or playing the harp, or the flute. I don't know about the Sirens, though; they were part bird, part beautiful women. On the whole not very attractive. They live on the rocky shore of Italy near Sicily, probably still, just as the Lorelei is still singing on top of the mountain on the shores of the Rhine; some say she sits on a rock in the middle of the Rhinenear Bingen, a fast flowing stretch of the river where many wrecks have occurred. It does not matter: she sings, men try to reach her, they drown.
Then there is a the mermaid that sits on a rock in Copenhagen's harbor. And then there are all the stories of seamen actually seing mermaids and some ill-meaning individuals claiming that they mistook the sea cows on the Florida coast to be mermaids. I woudn't. Even after months and months at sea, crossing the Atlantic in a wooden boat in the company of coarse men and no charm anywhere.
All these stories have but one thing in common: hard-working men, defying the elements alone, longing for the comfort of woman's arms, even if it means their death.
I got to change that CD!
It tells about a Maiden sitting on a mountain and combing her golden hair and singing a song that lets the skipper on the Rhine below forget all about himself and his boat crashes on the rocks.
It is a tale like Homer's Odyssey, the Sirens, and many other folk tales - always beautiful women luring honest working men to their doom through their enchanting music, singing, or playing the harp, or the flute. I don't know about the Sirens, though; they were part bird, part beautiful women. On the whole not very attractive. They live on the rocky shore of Italy near Sicily, probably still, just as the Lorelei is still singing on top of the mountain on the shores of the Rhine; some say she sits on a rock in the middle of the Rhinenear Bingen, a fast flowing stretch of the river where many wrecks have occurred. It does not matter: she sings, men try to reach her, they drown.
Then there is a the mermaid that sits on a rock in Copenhagen's harbor. And then there are all the stories of seamen actually seing mermaids and some ill-meaning individuals claiming that they mistook the sea cows on the Florida coast to be mermaids. I woudn't. Even after months and months at sea, crossing the Atlantic in a wooden boat in the company of coarse men and no charm anywhere.
All these stories have but one thing in common: hard-working men, defying the elements alone, longing for the comfort of woman's arms, even if it means their death.
I got to change that CD!
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