Melancholy Mixtape / July 2024

Seven moments that evoke the sentiments of summer — from a meditative walk through a sun-dappled forest to nocturnal songs of love and longing.

Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916). Melancholy, 1876. Various charcoals and gouache, with pastel and black chalk, and touches of stumping and erasing, on pale-pink wove paper with red and blue fibers altered to a golden tone, laid down on gray wove paper. Art Institute of Chicago

Welcome to the latest Melancholy Mixtape, a new series at Shades of Blue that weaves together moments of melancholy classical music to help you cultivate calm, connection, and healing throughout the month. (If you're a new subscriber, head over here to check out previous installments.)

This month, we'll explore music that evokes the sentiments of summer — from Antonín Dvořák's tranquil walk through a sun-dappled Bohemian forest to nocturnal songs of love and longing spanning three centuries.

Regardless of how you consume these Melancholy Mixtapes — getting to know each work one by one here on Substack, or listening to them all at once on YouTube, Spotify, or Idagio — I hope you enjoy this month's selections.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Piano Concerto No. 23, II. Adagio

Mitsuko Uchida, piano & conductor
The Cleveland Orchestra

In one of Mozart's rare minor-key meditations, a solo piano establishes the movement's midnight mood, the skyward leaps of its operatic melody in contrast to the sensuous sighs that emerge from the orchestral winds.

Hector Berlioz / La mort d'Ophélie (The death of Ophelia)

SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden und Freiburg
SWR Vocal Ensemble Stuttgart
Sylvain Cambreling, conductor
(Follow along with the French text and English translation.)

A women's choir takes up Gertrude's soliloquy of sorrow from Shakespeare's Hamlet, evoking the final moments of Ophelia — who, while collecting periwinkles, crow-flowers, and opal-tinted irises for a floral wreath, falls from the branch of a willow tree and into the brook below. As the rushing water carries her away, Ophelia continues her serenade of heartbreak and loss:

Like an outstretched sail
She floated, still singing,
Singing some ancient ballade,
Singing like a water-sprite
Born amidst the waves.

Giulio Caccini / Amarilli mia bella (Amaryllis, my beauty)

Jakub Józef Orliński, countertenor
Il Pomo d'Oro
(Follow along with the Italian text and English translation.)

Against the tender, tearful strains of a lute, a troubadour expresses his love for fair Amaryllis. Don't give into fears and doubts about my feelings for you, he sings to his beloved — just look deep inside at what is written on my soul: Amaryllis, my only true love.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel / July, from Das Jahr (The year) 

Christina Bjørkøe, piano

Fanny Hensel's portrait of July doesn't conjure a scene of sun-drenched splendor, but a dark night of the soul. Are the turbulent rumblings that arise from the depths of the piano a midsummer tempest inching toward us across an ink-black sky, or the emotional storms that rage in a lovelorn heart?

Antonín Dvořák / Silent Woods

Jacqueline du Pré, cello
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim, conductor

The burnished tenor of a solo cello transports us to the center of a tranquil forest in Dvořák's native Bohemia, where dappled light gently illuminates pastel-hued wildflowers and birdsong sails through the warm, humid air.

Gabriel Fauré / Après un rêve (After a dream)

Gérard Souzay, baritone 
Jacqueline Bonneau, piano
(Follow along with the French text and English translation.)

With a rising melody of impassioned grace, our speaker recalls a dreamy dance across the heavens with his beloved, their two bodies bathed in celestial light. But alas, the dream has ended, and with a sober consciousness now regained, anguish washes over his weary heart: Give me back your delusions, he pleads, return in radiance, O mysterious night!

Philip Glass / Opening, from Glassworks

Víkingur Ólafsson, piano

A mutable sea of broken chords flows across time, pierced only by a delicate tolling of bells, as if from a distant church. "The music does indeed seem to defy gravity," Ólafsson says of Glass's hypnotic score, its "gorgeous melodies appearing out of nowhere only to quickly disappear into the void."

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Listen to this month's Melancholy Mixtape on YouTube, Spotify, and Idagio.

Want to share your experience with one of the works I've shared this month? I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or reply to this email. (And if you enjoyed your time here today, would you ever so kindly tap that little heart below? 👇🏼)

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