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"The sky is blue,
The night is cold,
The moon is new,
But love is old,
And while this heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I can't see how this version of the lyric fits Romberg's melody. If the penultimate line had read "And all the while this heart of mine is singing:" It would seem to make more musical and grammatical sense.
I don't know what Hammerstein would have thought of this re-writing of his lyrics but one of his later collaborators, Richard Rodgers, wouldn't tolerate unauthorised changes to his scores.
As an aside , George Gershwin apparently said that a Sigmund Romberg premiere was the only time you went into the theatre whistling the tunes you were about to hear. Meow !
Referring to the performance of Romberg’s “Lover Come Back To Me” – sung by Amel Brahim-Djelloul - on the CD Atlantic Crossings , Mike Parr draws attention to how midway through the song a “jazz improvisation” is inserted. The recording is untraditional in other ways. After singing approximately two thirds of the lyric, the singer appears to repeat the song from the beginning. It is quite common for singers of the American Songbook to repeat a song’s lyric from the beginning, but they do this only after singing the whole lyric. Also, if a singer has already sung the verse (which is the case here), then if they repeat the song from “the beginning”, they will typically repeat it from the beginning of the refrain. But here the repetition is from the beginning of the verse, a kind of repetition I don’t think I’ve encountered before. And when, in the repetition, Brahim-Djelloul moves from the verse to the refrain, she sings not the beginning of the refrain but a version of the final stanza of the refrain – the part of the song that she has so far left out.
In Oscar Hammerstein II’s original, the verse to refrain transition looks like this:
You went away, I let you,
We broke the ties that bind;
I wanted to forget you
And leave the past behind.
Still, the magic of the night I met you
Seems to stay forever in my mind.
The sky was blue,
And high above
The moon was new,
And so was love.
This eager heart of mine was singing:
“Lover, where can you be?”
This is what Amel Brahim-Djelloul sings at first. But in repeating the beginning of the song she sings:
You went away, I let you,
We broke the ties that bind;
I wanted to forget you
And leave the past behind.
Still, the magic of the night I met you
Seems to stay forever in my mind.
The sky is blue,
The night is cold,
The moon is new,
But love is old,
And while this heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I call this a version of Stanza 4 because Hammerstein’s original Stanza 4 ends differently - in a way that is grammatical:
And while I’m waiting here
This heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I think it is possible that a lot of thought went into this recording's surprising departures from traditional practice – certainly the performance sounds carefully thought through. Presumably the artists were seeking a way of disrupting the smooth linearity of the original, one that accords with the musical disruption of the jazz intervention. Even so I am inclined to think that in this case the loss of lyrical coherence – no matter how carefully the departure from the original may have been thought out – is unfortunate.
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