The Popocatepetl rap

While Chris was reading a back copy of the London Review of Books in the bath last night, he came across a reference to Ernst Toch, an Austrian-Jewish composer who in 1930 wrote a fugue for voices, known in English as The Geographical Fugue. The extraordinary thing about it is, this is a composition for spoken voices.

You live and learn! Looking this up on the Internet at my husband’s request, I made another gratifying discovery, an amusing article about the composer by his grandson, Lawrence Weschler, in The Threepenny Review, who calls The Geographical Fugue a kind of “Weimar rap”!

Here’s how the German version goes (I’m thinking of introducing this to our Konversationsgruppe):

Fuge aus der Geographie

Ratibor!
Und der Fluss Mississippi
und die Stadt Honolulu
und der See Titicaca;
Der Popocatepetl liegt nicht in Kanada,
sondern in Mexico, Mexico, Mexico.
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi,
Kanada, Malaga, Rimini, Brindisi.
Ja! Athen, Athen, Athen, Athen,
Nagasaki, Yokohama,
Nagasaki, Yokohama,

Ratibor!

By clicking here you can hear a short excerpt. Clever, isn’t it?

In case anybody was wondering, Ratibor is the German name for a town in Silesia, now in Poland.

Advertisements