I heard a repeat program on Saint Paul Sunday the other day featuring Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg (who also appears briefly in the documentary The Audition). I've had the good fortune not only to have heard this particular program before, but also to have heard Hampson live many times at the Metropolitan Opera, and am delighted that he is now devoting a considerable amount of time and energy to advocating for the American art song tradition. On the program, he sang Stephen Foster's beautiful "Hard Times Come Again No More," written in 1854, as an art song, rather than as the American folk song it's become since the Civil War, and it was heartbreaking; if you can figure out how to make the listening device work on the Saint Paul Sunday website (linked above), you can hear it. In the meantime, I offer this lovely performance in memory of Kate McGarrigle (1946-2010).
The text Foster set, incidentally, has a lot of resonance with Catholic social teaching:
- Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
- While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
- There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
- Oh Hard times come again no more.
- Chorus:
- Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
- Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
- Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
- Oh hard times come again no more.
- While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
- There are frail forms fainting at the door;
- Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
- Oh hard times come again no more.
- (Chorus)
- There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
- With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
- Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
- Oh hard times come again no more.
- (Chorus)
- Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
- Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
- Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
- Oh hard times come again no more.
- (Chorus)
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