The Food of Love

I have to admit, I’m grateful NaBloPoMo ended when it did, because I have a choir concert this weekend and have been in rehearsals every damn night. Which is fun and rewarding and worth it and all, but is not the kind of schedule that lends itself to blogging.

And yet, the Will4Will habit is one that I don’t entirely wish to break. So, below the jump, a few performances of the opening lines of Twelfth Night.

First, the lines themselves:

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall;

O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more,

‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Now, I’ve already embedded my favorite setting of this text in a previous “choir night post,” so I will resist the temptation to do so again. Instead, here’s a selection of other settings which I dug up on YouTube.

One note of warning: turns out there’s a whole other “If music be the food of love” poem out there in the choral/classical literature:

If music be the food of love,
Sing on till I am fill’d with joy;
For then my list’ning soul you move
To pleasures that can never cloy.
Your eyes, your mien, your tongue declare
That you are music ev’rywhere.

Pleasures invade both eye and ear,
So fierce the transports are, they wound,
And all my senses feasted are,
Tho’ yet the treat is only sound,
Sure I must perish by your charms,
Unless you save me in your arms.

It’s by Henry Heveningham (1651-1700), and is best-known because of a setting by Purcell — which I’m embedding below because Purcell. Please note, however, that I am not linking to the alternate choral settings of Heveningham’s text I found by Jean Belmont and David Dickau. There’s only so much Shakespearean rip-off poetry I wish to encourage.

Then there’s this reading by Tom Hiddleston, which is topical, I suppose, only because of the number of fangirls and fanguys who might call the sonorous sound of his voice “music to my ears” or some-such.

And now, a couple pop-music adaptations that were entirely new to me until I discovered them over my lunch break today.

Frist, The Barenaked Ladies (!):

And a reggae arrangement (!!!) by Derrick Morgan:

Oh, what a brave new world that has such wonders in it…

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Image credit: dave dee, dozy, beaky, mick, tich, if music be the food of love, by Flickr user steve. Licensed via a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.