And don't we all, when it comes right down to it? I'm setting the first 5 lines of Psalm 31 in German, as a prosody exercise. My wife helped me make sure I understand where the accents are -- I mean I can do it, but sometimes you screw it up when it's not your own language.
I'm doing it for baritone and piano. Writing for the piano is not something I enjoy, as I kind of suck at it, but I gots to learn. I think it' going okay. It starts with a very in-your-face invocation on the word Herr, which I repeat a bunch of times.
The problem with these settings is that it's difficult to devise a structure based on sections and repetitions, as the meter -- in translation, anyway -- tends to be fairly irregular. So even though psalm essentially means song, making it into a song and not just a through-composed accompanied
melody is not trivial.
Anyhoo. I should have something in a few weeks.
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