Joan Baez’s favourite pieces of classical music: “Oh that’s so beautiful”
For most, folk music and classical could not be further apart. While they are both steeped in tradition, with performers learning a canon of songs and arrangements of pieces that may be hundreds of years old, the similarities don’t go much further. In not much time at all, anyone can become a folk singer with just a few chords, a passable voice and a good enough memory to remember the words to songs like ‘House of the Rising Sun‘, ‘Barbara Allen’ or ‘The Lakes of Pontchartrain’, but it can take years to master an instrument well enough to truly unlock the depth in some classical pieces.
For The Queen of Folk, Joan Baez, though, classical music is just as important to her as the folk songs that she is so famous for singing. Appearing on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs in 1993, fully half of Baez’s musical selections were classical pieces. “Any classic music was really my mother’s doing”, she explained. Perhaps it is the love and appreciation of classical music she has had since she was a child that informs and explains her beautiful soprano singing voice, her astonishing three-octave range, and her masterful control.
Explaining her choices, Baez said that it was a life-long love of two key components which informed her selections, “I had admired the human voice and the violin more than anything else, since I think I started listening when I was six or seven, and by eight years old those were the two things I loved the most in music”.
Opting not to take anything to the desert island, which was written by Bob Dylan – who she most famously sang and performed with in the early 1960s and again on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, and whose songs she continued to sing in concert right up until her 2018 retirement – Baez did, however, choose to take her own song written about Dylan, ‘Diamonds and Rust’, with her. Rounding out her selection with numbers by Van Morrison (‘Madame George’), Jackson Browne (‘Late for the Sky’) and Sin Ella (‘Gypsy King’), it was the four classical pieces which really caught the eye.
Joan Baez’s favourite pieces of classical music
‘Salut! Demeure chaste et pure’ – Charles-Francois Gounod
Taken from the legendary 1859 opera Faust, ‘Salut! Demeure chaste et pure’ is a cavatina – a short, simple song, with no second movement or repetition – taken from the third act. The story of the song sees Faust sending Méphistophélès to find a gift for Marguerite, while he stays back and sings a simple song of her natural, pure and childlike beauty.
Specifically choosing Jussi Björling’s rendition performed with the Stockholm Royal Orchestra, Baez has fond memories of listening to this song in her childhood, “my mother used to stop her cleaning, or vacuuming or whatever it was she was doing, and she’d go, ‘oh, that’s so beautiful’, and so I can’t hear this song without hearing my mothers voice”.
‘Goldberg Variations’ – Johann Sebastian Bach (Played by Glen Gould)
Unusually for a Bach work, the ‘Goldberg Variations’ were published in his lifetime, in 1741. Consisting of an aria and 30 variations, the works are written for piano and are bright, busy and joyous. It’s the kind of piece which will catapult a non-believer into a classical junkie.
“I was introduced to that when I was 16 or 17, again by my mother – any classical music was really my mothers doing – and, um, I just entered some kind of trance when he [Glen Gould] played it”.
‘Scottish Fantasy – 4th Movement’ – Max Bruch (Played by Jascha Heifetz)
With a Scottish mother, this is perhaps the least surprising choice of Baez’s classical selection. Explaining that she heard this piece “over and over again” as a child, to Baez, Heifetz is the “ultimate violinist”.
And the ‘Scottish Fantasy’ is an excellent example of his mastery of the instrument. In a recording with The New Symphony Orchestra of London conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, Heifetz plays with lightning speed and precision, sounding like a man possessed and, at times, as if he is playing more than one violin at once. This is a staggering piece of music and on listening to it, there is no wonder why Baez would hold Heifetz up as the very best of violin players.
‘O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion’ – George Frideric Handel
Taken from Scene 3 of Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah, ‘O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion’ is a piece for alto and chorus. Selecting the reading by English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, Baez recalls singing along with this song, “I would sit with my head in the loudspeakers, starting from whenever her material started to be around, and I would sing along with it. I mean, I can hum along or sing along with anything she’s ever sung. And I have no idea what she’s singing about, or half the time what the languages are!”
So it seems that singing along with her classical choices as a child really did inform Joan Baez’s beautiful voice later on, as she became the ‘Queen of Folk’. In 1964, Baez brought her classical and folk roots together with a monumental recording of the Brazilian piece Bachianas Brasileiras – itself a fusion of Brazilian folk and the music of Johan Sebastian Bach. Maybe there is not such a distance between the two genres, after all.
