Candide has a seriously wacky story line, but it also has some wonderful music in it. This semester I am assigning It Must Be So to one of my students. I love how haunting and sad it is. Gorgeous.
The last couple days I’ve been working on figuring out how many students I will have this semester and doing as much planning as I can ahead of time, including updating my students’ pages on my website. I won’t have much time for it once classes begin, so I’ve got to get what I can done now. So much music to wade through, considering each student’s individual strengths and what they need to work on, making sure they each have a good balance of languages, styles, time periods, composers… It’s a pain in the butt, but fun at the same time, because it means time spent listening to and reading through lots of great music.
Some of my other favorites that I’m assigning this semester: Last Rose of Summer by Flotow, Monks and Raisins – a nonsense song by Barber, the Papageno/Papagena duet from Die Zauberflote, Cielo e mar by Ponchielli, I am a Pirate King by Gilbert & Sullivan, and Clair de lune by Faure. Oh, and I must not forget Christopher Robin is Saying His Prayers by Fraser-Simson. Very fun song. Of course, I like everything that I assign to my students. I’m too selfish to suffer through a semester of listening to songs that I just don’t like. 
And I find that when I’m excited about the music my students are singing, it helps them be excited about it too.
