peer gynt

Guess what? I joined another choir. This one is singing Peer Gynt next week and they really needed some extra voices. And they're singing it in Norwegian. I was afraid I might be put on the spot, so I went through it with a dictionary last night but I couldn't find most of the words I didn't know - there's Danish, dialect, all kinds of wacky stuff going on in there. And indeed, when the alto who recruited me introduced me at tonight's rehearsal, she said that I speak Norwegian.

So we're working on diction in this one passage and the director asks me for some sense of what we're singing, and I'm like, "Uhhhhhhh...." Here's what I can translate of that section: "We are thoughts, you should have thought us. [Noun], you should have [verbed] us. [Adverb] we should have as [adjective] [plural noun]...." It's this really odd, abstract poem sung by a knot (yeah. no idea.) and a chorus of withered leaves, and it has a whooole lotta vocab I didn't learn in Norway.

I think he gave up on my alleged language skills then, but I redeemed myself later in the evening when we were singing a passage that goes "The prophet has come! Play flute and drum! To us he has come, over the sand sea riding!" *That* I can translate. Basic nouns and cognates are my forte.