Roses are red
Violets are blue
It’s too bad you’re single
No flowers for you
Valentine’s Day is a beautiful holiday — a day to celebrate all the joy that love, especially romantic love, brings into our lives. But the day can also be pretty alienating if you’re going through a rough spot, just went through a bad breakup, or are just plain down in the dumps. When that’s the case, every red shirt, jewelry advertisement, and flower peddler seem to be dead set on one common goal: making you absolutely miserable.
You’re sick of being told how to spend your February 14ths, and we get that. So, we’ve made an anti-Valentine’s Day playlist to get you through the day. We’ve got a Schumann mood that’s the musical equivalent of eating a tub of ice cream in your pajamas, a Mozartian manifesto on philandering lovers, and a Tchaikovskian depiction of the most unromantic dude on the planet.
So, read on if you’re into that kind of thing, and remember:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
But thorns in the flowers
Make love painful too
“In uomini, in soldati” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte
The sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte seem incapable of speaking about anything aside from their lovers, and their very opinionated, very sassy maid Despina is beyond over it. She’s sick and tired of hearing the ladies’ nonsense. Men being faithful? In her aria “In uomini, in soldati,” Despina proclaims, “The time for spinning such tales, even to babies, is past!” She continues, “Men are all made of the same stuff.” So, “let’s love for convenience, for vanity.” In other words, love is a hoax, so sleep around and have fun! And pretty soon, Despina has even more incentive to voice those beliefs loud and proud: When Don Alfonso hatches a plan to get the ladies to betray their boyfriends, he promises Despina a nice sum of money if she helps bring it to fruition.
“Aprite un po’ quegli occhi” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro
Figaro’s got a word of caution for his fellow men; however, when it comes to the Despinettas of the world (or, in his opinion, all women): “It’s madness to trust a woman! Open your eyes ... and see these women for what they are. ... They’re witches who cast spells to make you miserable ... masters in deceit, friends of trouble, who pretend, lie, feel no love, feel no pity.” See, Figaro thinks that his newly-wed wife is cheating on him with his boss, so you can imagine he’s not in the most googly-eyed mood. Set this scene in a card store, and Figaro would be throwing lovey-dovey Valentine’s Day cards onto the floor and drawing jagged lines on heart-shaped boxes of chocolate like broken hearts, all the while shouting, “Open your eyes! She never loved you!” And then, once he felt he’d successfully rid the shop of all romantic expressions, perhaps he’d wander off to a bar ...
“Estuans interius” from Orff’s Carmina Burana
… which is precisely where he might find a room full of like-minded individuals. He’d sit down on a stool next to a stranger and tell him his story, and, afterwards, the man would share his. He’d explain his carefree lifestyle and his attitude toward “love”: “No chains hold me captive, no lock holds me. ... I give in to vice, forget thoughts of virtue, I care more for pleasure than for salvation; dead in spirit, I think only of the flesh.” This text, sung by a baritone in the second part of Orff’s Carmina Burana, comes from a 13th-century codex in which lust and pleasure reign supreme. So, as it turns out, people have been creating anti-Valentine’s Day content since at least the Middle Ages!
“Und wüßten’s die Blumen, die kleinen” and “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen” from Schumann’s Dichterliebe
On a more serious note, when you lose someone you loved, Valentine’s Day can be a particularly tough day. In Dichterliebe, or “A Poet’s Love,” Schumann crafts a narrative of a love that develops over the course of several songs, which then falls apart when she leaves to wed another. But nothing mends a broken heart better than ice cream, and the midpoint of the cycle is like a musical equivalent of crying into a pint of the sweet stuff in your pajamas. In the first of the pair of songs, the narrator laments the loss of his beloved, while in the second, he overhears the wedding festivities from afar as cupids sob over the death of their love.
“Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer” from Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Like Schumann, Mahler also identified with the rather thornier parts of the rose bush that is love. In “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,” or “I have a burning knife,” from Songs of a Wayfarer” which similarly tells a story of love lost to another, thoughts of the lost love torment the narrator like “a knife in my breast.” Everything evokes memories of the beloved: “When I look at the sky, I see two blue eyes! ... When I walk in the yellow field, I see from afar her golden hair!” The pain these images evoke is too much for the narrator, who wishes to be “lying on the black bier, so as never to open my eyes again!” Okay, so the dude is a little bit dramatic, but, hey, with the pressure of Valentine’s Day expectations mounting, how is he supposed to react? Sure, he lost his love, but more importantly, what are people going to think when he walks past the card store without stopping in to buy a card? What will they whisper when he’s waiting on line at the supermarket without a box of chocolates in his cart?
“Lonely House” from Weill’s Street Scene
On a similarly glum note, we can’t forget about the hopeless romantics — the ones who long for valentines of their own and pass the day watching romance movies and scrolling through engagement announcements on social media. (You know, the ones Despina would laugh at and Figaro would scold.) Sam from Kurt Weill’s Street Scene longs for companionship and questions why he hasn’t yet found it in his own life: “I guess there must be something I don’t comprehend. Sparrows have companions. Even stray dogs find a friend.” The love and affection he sees around him cause him to reflect on his own happiness: “The night for me is not romantic. Unlock the stars and take them down. I’m lonely in this lonely house, in this lonely town.” This is a particularly good song to listen to when you’re sitting alone at a bar, sipping a glass of red or drinking a beer.
”Kogda bï zhizn domashnim krugom” from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
And finally, we have the Act I Eugene Onegins of the world — the ones for whom Valentine’s Day (and love, in general) is but a load of B.S. For Eugene Onegin, Valentine’s Day is a consumerist holiday that entices naive consumers into thinking that they want, or even need, things they don’t. When Tatania sends Onegin a letter professing her love for him, Onegin responds with an icy rejection: “If I wished to be confined by domesticity, if friendly fate had destined me to be a father, a husband, then, I’m sure, I’d seek no bride but you. But I was not destined for such bliss. It’s foreign to my soul. ... I love you with a brother’s love.” Romantic. Oh, and the final blow: “Learn to control your feelings.” Ouch. Those flower peddlers and jewelry advertisers clearly aren’t succeeding at pulling the wool over this man’s eyes. Well, not yet, at least …
