From the art of the drinking song to songs about drink, Stuart Walton celebrates the ways in which “wine finds its musical enunciation.”
The happiness that wine creates, once it has reached a critical mass in our system, must emerge in some expressive form—voluble chatter and laughter, but most joyously of all, in the enduring cultural paradigm of drink-fuelled singing. Even if wine has reminded us we are sorrowful, lovelorn, blue, it still finds its musical enunciation.
Franz Schubert’s Drinking Song D.183 (1815) was inspired by his fondness for the rowdy culture of Vienna’s Heurigen, taverns that served the just-pressed wine of the new harvest, fizzing and turbid, knocked back with fatty morsels, accompanied by cheap music. A setting of a philosophical lyric by Alois Zettler, the song apostrophizes the two essentials of life: “Ihr, Freunde, und du, gold'ner Wein / Versüsset mir das Leben” (“You, friends, and you, golden wine / Sweeten life for me”). There is literally no point in living without these vital amenities, as the refrain insists. Riches, power, even getting into Heaven are worth nothing, the singer avows, without his favorite people and his favorite drink.
A drinking song has to sound like something with which everybody can join in. That was the intention of the drunken fugue, a central European appropriation from the Scottish poet James Thomson, author of “Rule, Britannia!,” that concludes the Autumn movement of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons (1801). “Juh-he! Juh-he! Der Wein ist da” (“Drink up! Drink up! The wine is here”). A chorus erupts in glad-hearted song, to the emphatic rhythms and melodic lilt that drunken singing requires. Thomson had given it perhaps a little more Roxburgh razzle than Haydn dared:
set, ardent, in
For serious drinking. Nor evasion sly
Nor sober shift is to the puking wretch
Indulged askew; but earnest, brimming bowls
Lave every soul, the table floating round,
And pavement, faithless to the fuddled foot.
In 1929, yet another Austrian composer, Alban Berg, wrote a twelve-tone setting of three lyrics from the 19th century’s most committed intoxicationist, Charles Baudelaire, for soprano and orchestra, to translations by Stefan George. In the first, “The Soul of Wine,” the singer, in the persona of wine itself, recalls the ancient function of wine to console and refresh, before the hedonistic impulse kicks in to the accompaniment of a fragile tango pastiche: “Du stülpst die Ärmel – stützest beide Arme / Du wirst mich preisen und zufrieden sein” (“With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table / You will glorify me and be content”). There isn't proper drinking unless things are getting happy-sloppy, daft as a tango in a Viennese bar.
The Anglo-American wine-drinking song
The Anglo-American popular song tradition has frequently been uneasy with wine, which wasn’t native to either culture until well into the postwar period. There is strawberry wine, elderberry wine, the Shondells' sweet cherry wine, Nina Simone's lilac wine, anything but actual wine. Where wine was referenced, it was often emblematically sweet, an attribute that gives it fleeting poignancy in the Tom Springfield/Frank Farian tune, “The Carnival is Over,” in which we hear of the departing lover that “your kiss was sweet as wine.” We are back in the world of Greco-Roman antiquity, when wine was archetypally sweet rather than sour or bitter.
A reference to Champagne always adds luster to an idealized lover figured in song, especially where the brand is name-checked. The pretty cabinet of Queen’s “Killer Queen” is stocked with Moët et Chandon. In the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” there is pink champagne on ice beneath the mirrored ceiling. It gets better. Billy Joel’s date in “Big Shot” is clutching a glass of Dom Pérignon. At a certain point, American rap artists became obsessed with Louis Roederer’s Cristal. Nor were they necessarily hogging it to themselves: in “Rotten Apple,” New York’s 50 Cent is “teachin the hoodrats what Cristal taste like,” an invaluable public service. More eerily intriguing is the sudden appearance in Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” of a close companion in an otherwise deserted place: “There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking Champagne.” Red alert.
What pop lyrics have been more comfortable with is wine as solace for the shattered heart. Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine,” memorably covered by UB40 in 1983, is a medication for helping the deserted singer to forget. Lloyd Cole bemoans the fact that “the last thing you need is me and my weeping wine.” In the universe of country music, the titles alone tell one sob saga after another: “Tears Will Be the Chaser for Your Wine” (Wanda Jackson); “Sorrow Overtakes the Wine” (Porter Wagoner); “Wine, You’ve Used Me Long Enough” (George Jones); and, apocalyptically, “When the Wine Wears Off” (Blake Shelton).
Joy will out, however. Find an online streaming device and play the greatest drinking song ever written, in the Italian tradition of a brindisi, a song that calls on everybody to stop frazzling and whingeing and weeping, and have a drink: “Libiamo, ne' lieti calici” (“Let’s drink from the joyful cups”). An exhilarating soprano-tenor duet that booms into full party chorus in the first act of La Traviata (1853), it is the essential oil of celebration. “Let's enjoy the cup and the songs, the beautiful night and the laughter / Let the new day catch us in this paradise.” Oh, go on then.
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