Franz Schubert - THE HURDY-GURDY MAN
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- This song was written by the Austrian composer, Franz Schubert, in 1827 the final song of a cycle called DIE WINTERREISE (The Winter’s Journey) and it is one of the most popular and enduring songs ever composed.
Originally for voice and piano with words by the German poet, Wilhelm Müller, it tells the story of a wandering “drehleier” player, and was consequently called “Der Leiermann”. Schubert is not talking about an organ grinder. In fact, the grinder organ (sometimes called the barrel organ) is not a musical instrument at all. It is a mechanical music box with a crank. The hurdy-gurdy, on the other hand, is an ancient instrument on which tunes can actually be played.
The piano, for which Schubert wrote the original accompaniment to this song, does not do a very good imitation of a hurdy-gurdy, and the hurdy-gurdy does an equally poor imitation of a piano. Consequently, I rearranged the song so that harmonies and chord changes can be played. This was possible because the hurdy-gurdy in the video is a solid-body instrument made by French luthier, Philippe Mousnier, which allows the player to use all the electronic devices and tools that are available for electric guitars (harmonizers, pitch shifters, signal splitters, and all the FX devices in the electronic arsenal).
At two places in this song, I show the pedal keyboard (similar to the kind of thing organists use) which allows me to control the drone strings using my feet.
For singers, another advantage of the solid-body instrument is that, like the electric guitar, it uses magnetic pickups to amplify its sound. This means that it doesn’t make much noise and its sound doesn’t leak into your vocal microphone, so it is possible to sing while playing the instrument without drowning out your own voice! It also means that you can practice the instrument quietly at 3 o’clock in the morning without waking up everybody in the house.
I have wanted to sing this song for years and figured it’s now or never! 😀
Always a treat to see Peter Pringle perform these historical pieces of art.
this was written in German + for the piano, so this is actually a modern adaptation rather than an authentic recreation. Just FWI
Just beyond the town the Hurdy Gurdy man,
With his frozen fingers plays as best he can.
'Round his little cup and moving to and fro,
No one throws a coin.He dances in the snow.
No one throws a coin. He dances in the snow.
No one wants to hear him.
Everyone is gone.
Except the howling dogs. But still the man plays on.
The wheel spins round and round despite the bitter chill.
The turning Hurdy Gurdy man is never still.
The turning Hurdy Gurdy man is never still.
Wondrous man of music may I come along?
On your Hurdy Gurdy will you play my song?
" Wondrous man of music..." Indeed
Wunderlicher Alter darf ich mit dir gehen?
Wunderlich ist nicht wunderbar, sondern merkwürdig, eigenartig.
Oh hey, the coolest man on youtube is back!
Peter Pringle is my medicine
Always a lovely moment in time when Peter shares with us.
The long coda is important,here.
After the last line, “will you play my song?”, we aren’t sure if there is more to come.
We listen to the sound of the Hurdy Gurdy.
When it stops so abruptly, our memory goes back to his voice.
We have all along thought of the singer as a narrator.
Suddenly he becomes a real person speaking to the street musician.
Reminds me of Traffic's Dear Mr. Fantasy.
Awwwww, that was mesmerizing and beautiful indeed. 💜 Yet another fine piece of music from Peter and lo behold, his voice carries the same haunting power in modern English as it does in Babylonian or ancient Egyptian.
Yeah, agreed. His singing of The Death of Arthur is beautiful!
Schubert goes straight into the soul like lightning into the water
Thank you for the song Mr. Pringle
Thank you!
"....Down through all eternity, the crying of humanity. Here comes the hurdy gurdy man singing songs of love"
So interesting and beautiful song! Your knowledge of music goes far beyond most in the business! I love music of all genres and all time periods... thanks for sharing with us!
Lovely!
wonderful
I was just about to go to bed when I saw the notification. Beautiful as always 😌.
luminous dude
This is maybe not oriental but this is perfect inspiration song for theremin. How could you learn so many instruments! Amayzing. I love when I can hear people who also prefer minor scales and "sad sounds". It is so touching.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH PETER❤❤❤ YOUR WORK IS VERY GREAT AND BEAUTIFUL 🌹♥️
LOVE SCHUBERT AND..YOU ...PETER PRINGLE 💐🙏🌳
MERCI💗💗💗💗
Well that wasn't the song I was looking for but holy fucking goddamn am I glad I found this one.
Chill
Красивый голос ❤️
Thank you for your work and contributions to music!!
Hauntingly beautiful!
If anyone is looking for a magnificent performance sung in the original German, look up Thomas Quasthoff.
@redmarkerkhof Agreed Thomas Quasthoff does for the Hurdy Gurdy Man in German what Peter does for the song in English, a poignant and bitter sweet depiction of innocent suffering amid the cruelty of life
There is something archetypal about the figure of the Hurdy-Gurdy Man.
I recognize him as an image first encountered in my childhood.
His origin is Eastern Europe.
Why do I think he might be Jewish?
The Fiddler on The Roof.
The Rag Picker.
The Outcast
The Stranger among us who has looked upon things we all shy away from and so, we shy away from him all the while knowing he has something wise and terrible to teach us.
Someone recently said to me that more than being loved, we need to feel that we belong.
I thought about that and it feels right !
Family,
Religion,
Nation,
City
Class
Sexual orientation
Local Sports Team
College
Fraternity
Political party
These are things we belong to.
We support them.
We exalt them.
We defend them.
We oppose those who attack them.
We feel elated when another member of our tribe succeeds.
Our membership helps give us our identity,helps define us.
What does it feel like when we belong to no group?
Who among us does not belong to any group?
The beggar.
The homeless
The elderly living alone.
The black man in a white world.
The mis-shapen
The grotesque.
This is the Hurdy Gurdy man..... The one we fear most because he lives our greatest nightmare.
He does not belong!
When we are dying we feel the ultimate alone-ness.
We are alive but no longer belong to the world of the living.
Perhaps Schubert, who was dying when he wrote this, was making common cause with the hurdy-gurdy man. Outcasts... together.
" May I come along? Will you play my song ?"
Meant to say earlier that the video quality is amazing on this one and that's a nice gurd. You really are a treasure of a human being, man. You're the performer of our age.
Magnificent, as always! ✨
Wow, how impactful. Well done, Peter. One of my favorites.
Can you tell me what language this video is speaking? search here on youtube for " Zeutrakh Enlil "
By accident I find this guy... I'm glad I did... it makes me think of the music going around at their times... this was their rock & roll of their day... (imagine YOUR parents yelling at you for listening to THIS kind of tunes, and reminding you about the Gregorian Chants... Now, there's music the church approves of...)
Love Schubert and this is his best album.
Beautiful song, as always!
I love you Peter
Dang, that's a beautiful song
Thank you so much!
Delightedly moments, ours souls recognize the ethereal timeless sounds ...
Namaste 🕉️
You're the man, Peter! Great stuff as usual.
I wondered why I was so lonely and broken.. thank you, my love.
Fantastic ! :) Thank you
I like the rug! Keep up the good work.
The man!
Thank you.
So beatifull
Brilliant...
Großartig! Great job. The englisch translation is well made.
just wow
you have awaken something in me i really needed.
Pure magic.
Just thank You Master
Strange to release in the dead of
summer as I almost wish to be that poor freezing man right now, fantastic as always
That was beautiful.
Fantastic as always.
I applaud your arrangement of this and actually prefer it to the original piece. Time well spent
Can't get enough of your stuff Mr Pringle
Especially the ancient stuff :D
wow man!
I'm a big fan of the hurdygurdy, but they're not cheap...
Dude, who are you?! I just found you like an hour ago and I'm hooked
Very beautiful and powerful performance. Was wondering about the translation to English though. I think some points in the original German were important - that he is barefoot in the snow, and he staggers, not dances. That the dogs do not merely howl, they snarl directly at the leiermann, as dogs are rumored to do around harbingers of death, and like a harbinger of death, it's not merely that the villagers are gone, it's that they are actively not seeing or hearing him, as they might want to ignore their own coming mortality.
SUBLIME ❤
Look out drake here comes our boy PP to take the platinum
He should have played Schubert's real accompaniment melody on his hurdy gurdy.
Another song O Bard!
The original composition by Schubert has a pretty melody between the lines of the verses immitating a hurdy-gurdy. I wonder how that would sound with an actual hurdy-gurdy.
Oh. There you are.
Have a look at the CD of raumklang by Nataša Mirković (voice) & Matthias Loibner (hurdy-gurdy) from the Winterreise 2011
Blessings on your birthday.
The hurdy-gurdy is of course the correct accompanying instrument and not the piano. Why Schubert did not use the hurdy-gurdy but the piano will probably never be clarified. Was it his personal taste in music, perhaps the socially low position of the hurdy-gurdy in this epoch, did the elegant piano serve to aesthetize the beggar's life of the hurdy-gurdy-man? In any case, Schubert tried to lean the piano accompaniment very close to the drone sound of the hurdy-gurdy.
Now to go the opposite way and to use the actually "correct" accompanying instrument, the hurdy-gurdy, for the "Leiermann" is obvious. I have heard many such interpretations over the past three decades, but never before with such a wonderfully soft voice. Bravo!
It is an all-round successful interpretation, the best I know. However, I would like to make one very tiny point of criticism: The sound has too much reverb for me personally, and it is uncomfortably artificial. I would be 100% happy with a new recording in a good acoustic room with natural reverb and no electronic frippery, so I'm 99% happy.
👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏
Didn't Schubert simply compose all his "Folk songs" for piano? Anyway, interesting thoughts about the aethetic!
@@MensHominis : Schubert was just as much a "child of his time" as we are. The pianoforte became "the" musical instrument of the upper class, the nobility and the rich bourgeoisie in the 19th century. Anyone who wanted to be successful in the upper class could not perform with the hurdy-gurdy, which was mostly a beggar's instrument in the 19th century.
In the Baroque period, the hurdy-gurdy was still popular as a fancy musical instrument for virtuoso music. A good hundred years later, Mozart's father and son, or even Josef Haydn, used the hurdy-gurdy to capture the sound of the country, the farmers and the common people.
Later composers used other instruments to imitate the typical drone sound of the hurdy-gurdy. Beethoven used a very simple chord progression for his song "Marmotte" (from 8 songs, Op. 52), but it is actually a drone piece. Schubert clearly imitates the hurdy-gurdy drone in his piano accompaniment.
@@thomasm.schallabock7446 - thank you! Some of this I knew, and I've played the Marmotte myself. Now that you say it, its drone sound is obvious to me, never thought about it! Even its staccato-esque beat could be done by a good hurdygurdy player.
There may be a financial reason. Schubert's product was sheet music and his market was those who could read music.
@@urutherford, your argument is a good explanation.
Beutifulll
Superb! Also: listen and watch Philippe Sly and Adam Cicchiletti’s Leiermann
Hurdy Girdy man needs a Witcher for patronage.
Bro do you have spotify? I would love to download all thid stuff!
8 mill. Austrians are annoyed that you call schubert a german komponist... :) But your interpretation is awesome as ever!
Schubert, whether Austrian or German belongs to the world, as does Peter Pringle.
go grandpa go!
What is the name of that instrument?
Drehleier, hurdy gurdy
Vielle
What is the purpose of the foot pedals he is using?
I believe they’re bass pedals of some sort. Like what organs have.
The notes with the video explain all of that.
Franz Schubert, was of course Austrian.
I am going to go and stand in the corner for the rest of the day!
S E N S E I
It sounds otomatone
UA-cam really is the closest thing we have to a time machine.
Peter Pringle is the machine operator.
And always into the future it goes.
Too true , he has a musical link.
Peter expresses the poignancy and pathos of the fragile little Hurdy Gurdy man in his English arrangement of Franz Schubert's piece, aptly accompanied by an actual Hurdy Gurdy.
Both Peter's arrangement and the German arrangement of Schubert's "Der Leierman" written for voice and piano profoundly plumb the depths of the human heart.
Now that Peter has released his version, I often play the two arrangements one after the other, because I cannot decide which one I like better.
Here is a link to Thomas Quastoff's arrangement:
ua-cam.com/video/pze4NxCOjg0/v-deo.html
Hi Birgit,
It was Thomas Quastoff’s truly brilliant version of this song (accompanied beautifully on the piano by Daniel Barenboim) that inspired me to attempt a less classical version on the hurdy-gurdy!
@@copperleaves Hi Peter, both you and Thomas Quastoff have such fluid expressive voices that immediately transport me to that cold, frigid night in the outskirts of the village, where the fragile little man tries to keep warm by shuffling his bare feet and summons up his courage by playing the hurdy gurdy as that pack of dogs surrounds him and growls.
The only little detail that prevents the song from achieving absolute perfection, is that the English lyricist translated "knurren" which means "growling" as "howling" . "Howling" in German is "heulen" As in "die Wölfe heulen den Mond an", "The wolves are howling at the moon"
That miniscule detail in no way diminishes my enjoyment of your excellent performance.
I play all of your songs from your early days to your superb Noel Coward performance and marvel at your vast mastery of so many diverse musical styles and the many instruments that you give voice to.
Your musical growth is phenomenal, and you are getting ever stronger. I hope your genius will bring joy to people for millennia to come.
I see there are some pedals on the floor in front of him.
Are they part of a traditional Hurdy Gurdy?
Is his instrument electrified?
@@renzo6490 All of that is explained in his notes with the video.
@@Irenesinger : Indeed it is ! Thanks.
pleasant voice
I thoroughly enjoy all your videos. Love it!