To celebrate Father's Day, violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen selects six pieces of music that celebrate parenthood
I doff my hat to all the wonderful fathers in my life, starting with my own, who is always there for me, and my husband and the father of my children, who holds the home fort whenever I am away playing concerts or recording, and shares the day to day parenting with me.
As I'm self employed, I didn't have any real maternity leave, only the small government maternity allowance which is not equivalent to loss of earnings, and there was no way to share parental leave with my partner as I might have if I had the option available to me. Many fathers are fighting hard for greater parental involvement at the moment, in a system stacked against them, with the UK having the worst paternity allowance in Europe.
So here, I’d like to celebrate the fathers who are changing the status quo for the next generation, caring for, nurturing, playing, educating, and sharing the running of the home that their families live in.
I have collected a few pieces that fathers have written for their children, and pieces that give me a sense of home, the place where children grow into themselves, and that we all a recreate for ourselves in different iterations throughout our lives. I’ve also included a few of my most loved works that also hold magical childhood memories for me, and to which I still return to on the concert stage time and again.
Music about parenthood
1. Debussy Children’s Corner
Unhappily I never practised the piano enough to play this whole set of pieces, the violin being my obsession from a young age. My father had the unenviable task of helping me practice some of these pieces when I was a young child, and I used to make mistakes on purpose to frustrate him. Ah, children….
I had to include them here, written as they were by Debussy for his beloved daughter, Claude-Emma. The world of playfulness, wonder and whimsy that these pieces inhabit is a wonderful painting of the world of childhood by a doting father.
2. Bach Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor: Andante
Bach is a constant companion for me and has been since I was a young teenager. Whilst this wasn’t one of the works he wrote for his many children, the Andante from the A minor sonata brings me a profound sense of peace and being at home. The soothing heartbeat and simple melody that spins out across a myriad of emotions resolving with such tenderness and simplicity are the epitome of the idyll of home.
3. George Xiaoyuan Fu Lîla-by
My brother-in-law George wrote this gorgeous lullaby for his daughter, my niece Lîla. It is part of a suite for solo piano that he wrote about crossing from one land to another, one island of life to another, as happens when we enter in to the new and wild world of parenthood.
4. Brahms Wiegenlied
Whilst Brahms was not himself a father, I couldn’t not include this lullaby. My father sang it to me when I was little, with silly words no less, and we’ve sung it to our children. The power of lullabies to comfort and give a sense of security in the strange depths of the night is surely one of our most foundational experiences, which tie us, like pearls on a chain of memory, to generations both before us and after us.
Brahms wrote this for the birth of Bertha Faber’s second child. She had been a great love of his who had married someone else. They kept in touch, and this famous lullaby incorporates a song that Bertha used to sing to Brahms when they were younger.
5. Schubert Trout Quintet
I grew up listening to Schubert's Trout Quintet, and it was one of the classical works that my father grew up with too. It was his father’s favourite, and he had the recording with Amadeus quartet members, Emil Gilels and Rainer Zepperitz, which still today warms my heart whenever I hear it. I’m touring this evergreen masterpiece at the moment, and in rehearsal there are many moments when we search for something more domestic, more tender, more consoling, more homely.
6. Vivaldi Violin Concerto in A minor
As a child, we often listened to the musical stories by Classical Kids. There was “Mr. Bach comes to call”, “Beethoven lives upstairs”, and mine and my sister’s favourite, “Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery”, in which a Stradivarius violin and the power of music hold the key to a child lost in the mists of a shipwreck. My 4 year old is now an enthusiastic fan of this story (since infancy, she has called Vivaldi “The Magic Music” after hearing me practice The Four Seasons.)
The A minor concerto featured here captured my heart with its searing beauty and interplay of light and dark as a small child, and it still does. Vivaldi wrote so much of his great music for the orphaned girls that he taught in the Ospedale della Pietà, where he was director of music for over 20 years, including some who went on to be on the great virtuosi of their day, such as Anna Maria della Pietà.
Vivaldi was one of the fathers of modern violin playing and his music still evokes the magical world of Venice, with its watery secrets, wild masked parties, and crowning beauty rising from the waves. It’s music to heal the most battle-weary of souls.