Singing Tubercular songs with Fader Movitz (Fredman’s Epistles 1790) (Feb 11, 2025)

Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..."

While those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis (Mar 18, 2025), the rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its meanings, and its character.

Musically speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines (Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of Hoffmann)

• Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13534649609362002

• Kasunic, David. “Tubercular Singing,” Postmodern Culture 24:3 (May 2014).

• Morens, David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.

If we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom. And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from Moulin Rouge, not to mention Violetta herself.

TB / Consumption accounted for up to one in six deaths in France 

by the early twentieth century.

The prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But women feature in much of the music, both before and after the baccilus’s discovery in 1882.

Take, for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters. Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.

• Fader Movitz (Freman’s Epistles by Carl Michael Bellman, 1790)

• Chopin dies of consumption, 1849

• Violetta Valery (La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)

• 1865 Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)

• Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, 1881)

• 1882: Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

• Mimi (La Bohème,  Giacomo Puccini,1896)

• Lady Madeline (La Chute de la Maison Usher, Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)

• Sister Benedict (Bells of St Mary's, 1945)

• Fantine (Les Misérables, 1980)

• Satine (Moulin Rouge, 2001)

   

 “In the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also called ‘the robber of youth.’” -- Barberis et al (2017)

On the list, the odd man out – the odd MAN – is that 18^th century character, Fader Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no. 30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To Father Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy]. Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion. Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition, however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead, his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking songs and resignation.

The composer of the work, Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician, and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles, contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy. Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from the book’s character list.

Coming in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease. Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to sing about the fond memories one had.

Drink from your glass, see Death waiting for you,
Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep.
Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door,
Beats it again, maybe even in a year.
Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave.
- - - Strike now the Octave;
Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||

(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me;
Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound;
The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches;
Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin.
Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes.
- - - Lend me your bottle.
Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||

The song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.

The third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But, think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The inevitable is, well, inevitable.

                           

“About 10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25

In this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet people continue to die.

And some of them are dying today in America.

Today, we are experiencing the country's highest-ever TB case numbers over a one-year period. -- AMA report, Feb 2025 and Kansas Civic Alert, Feb 2025

With the Kansas City outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE. 

Don’t be “that” character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.

To Banish the Earworm: "If We Were Married" by Shaina Taub (1/8/25)

An ear with three arrows containing identical music pointing at it

Last night, somewhat to my morning chagrin, I taught “If we were married” from Shaina Taub’s Suffs (2022) in my Women and Music class. I’d seen the whole musical in the Fall, and this jaunty hit about gender discrimination in marriage back in the 1910s stuck with me. Our classroom take-away: music in good hands can function effectively as feminist critique. However, I had an additional personal take-away: bits of the song have been stuck in my head all morning.

The song is sung in alternation, Dudley leading and Doris providing a gender-informed counter-perspective to each of his observations. It’s a familiar set-up, one most of us would recognize as informing the structure of Stephen Sondheim / Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story. In each song, we swing from one perspective to another at a lively clip. Bernstein’s perspective juxtaposes Rosalia’s nostalgia for Puerto Rico with Anita’s tart rejoinders:

WEST SIDE STORY (Broadway lyrics)

ROSALIA: I'll drive a Buick through San Juan.
ANITA: If there's a road you can drive on.
ROSALIA: I'll give my cousins a free ride.
ANITA: How you get all of them inside?

(This is reframed as a dialog of women vs men in both of the film versions, but the song is well worth a re-listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoQEddtFN3Q )

In comparison with Bernstein, Taub’s exchange between Dudley and Doris gives each character more extended space to elaborate on their perspective. She builds an antecedent-spun-out-consequent phrase pair instead of a single phrase each like the West Side Story number:

SUFFS

• DUDLEY: If we were married / I'd promise to cherish you just as a gentleman should
• DORIS: If we were married / I'd promise to forfeit my legal autonomy <syncop> for good
• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd buy our own acre of land for our own little house
• DORIS: If we were married / Our possessions and property would solely belong to the masculine spouse
• BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married

Cherish or forfeit: the gendered nature of the marriage divide is laid out clearly in Taub’s narrative, and the clever rhyming of house with its imagined future of belonging “to the masculine spouse” sets the groundwork of the song firmly into the space of feminist advocacy. Doris is, after all, secretary for the suffragist organization, and so grounded in the bureaucratic and legal realities of women’s (absence of) rights.

But while Bernstein’s “America” breaks into the famous hemiola ( 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1 & 2 & 3 &), Taub uses a different strategy to enliven her narrative. Having already spun out the consequent clause into two units, the second strophe breaks down in the fourth line, as Doris’s iteration of women’s legal and economic oppression refuses to fit to the planned structure. 

• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd fill out our family, and life would be simply sublime
• DORIS: If we were married / I'd sure have your children, 'cause <syncop> contraception's a federal crime
• DUDLEY: If we were married / We'd save up a nest egg to cushion us later in life
• DORIS: If we were married / My earnings would be in your name / And I couldn't control my own spending / Or open a bank account, or sign a contract, or hire a lawyer / Because economically speaking / I die by becoming your wife
• <PAUSE>
• BOTH: If we were married (if we were married) / If we were married

How does that work? Doris’s frustration with inequality is made manifest by insistent and extended repetition. Instead of an antecedent and two consequent phrases (b1 and b2), we get stuck on b1, which is itself made up of a three note rising motive – for a total of fifteen statements, instead of three!

DORIS: 

•   a    If we were married /
• b1    My earnings would be in your name /
• 2 And I couldn't control my own spending /
• 3 Or open a bank account,
• 4 or sign a contract,
• 5 or hire a lawyer /
• 6 Because economically speaking /
• b2    I die by becoming your wife

We had already known to listen to Doris as the “interesting” partner. She uses syncopation – pausing where we were expecting sound, and then delivering some kind of “kicker” clause. I’d be giving up my rights, she says. For good. It’s a clever rhythmic framing.

The second half of the song has a contrasting segment in which Doris muses about how women buy into the patriarchal system: “Daughters are taught to aspire to a system / Expressly designed to keep 'em under control.” She bemoans the legality of domestic violence within marriage – a situation which surprises Dudley (and in the story line helps to awaken him to the need for the suffrage movement, moving him toward a role of advocacy), asking the kicker: “Can you believe it is 1916 / And all of these things are still actually true?”

Questioning patriarchal systems is serious stuff, but set here to a boppy tune with swing overtones. The humor helps to frame the lesson in ways that the protagonists (and the audience) can hear the disconnect of romance and reality, and recognize for themselves the injustice of that very disconnect.

Why am I writing about it? Because after hearing it, it totally got stuck in my head, particularly the repeated “if” clauses (“if we were married…”) and also Doris’s rolling extension of the second stanza. Both those parts invoke underlying and ongoing worries I have about historical echoes, since injustices from 1916 have uncomfortable resonances with the present day. 

But also, and perhaps more importantly, the tune is just plain sing-songy – simple, approachable, and repetitive without being boring. And it swings. In short, the front part of the song can definitely be classed as earworm worthy!

And now, having paid “If we were married” close attention (yes, brain, okay, we can spend time with it), now I’m going to go put on some Hildegard, and settle into my administrative duties for a while.

Happy listening. May your earworms be pleasant teases for you, just as this one has been for me!