Composer: Manney, Charles Fonteyn
Dates: 1872-1951
Song title: Comes my love today? = Kommt feins Liebchen
heut'?
Opus, no., etc.: op.3, Nr.2
Music collection title: Five Songs for medium voice
Imprint(s): Boston: O. Ditson Company, 1897
Analysis: Both strophes consist of two 4-measure phrases, almost entirely in 8th-note motion, and all but the last phrase starting with the same 2-measure "theme": an octave drop followed by rising steps and thirds. This "theme" seems quite appropriate in general to the text: the perpetual rise and fall (or vice versa) of morning's hope and evening's disappointment. Word by word the setting fits the original German somewhat better than the "preferred" English. The piano interlude consists of three statements in successively lower registers of a short chromatic sighing motif. After re-statement of the "theme," the second strophe is varied and intensified with wider skips and accidentals. "Dreamily by day I wander" ("Träumend wie im halben Schlummer") does indeed dreamily wander through several keys in a short span, ending inconclusively on the dominant. The only resolution (and the only root-position tonic chord in the song) comes in the final measures of the piano postlude, which begins with another re-statement of the "theme."
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Copyright © 2000, Peter W. Shea