Last week, I posted about Cantor Yosef Gottesman and his "cover version" of the theme to the Titanic. I got a great comment from the Jewish musician Gerson Veroba, who was pretty unimpressed. He made two points.
1. This isn't a cover of the song, it's Gottesman taking a well known standard (Eishet Chayil) and singing it to the melody of the Titanic theme. Sum total creativity or musical insight involved...zero.
2. While the Titanic theme is a lovely melody, the central themes of the song are completely inappropriate to Eishet Chayil. Titanic is a love story used to highlight a larger story of human tragedy. Eishet Chayil is from Proverbs 31, a description of how a virtuous woman behaves, and is typically sung on Shabbat after services and dinner, by a husband to extol the virtues of his wonderful wife. Tragic? Nope. Bad thematic match.
So while I think Veroba has a definite point on the thematic elements argument. I need to go back to his first point.
Oh. Eishet Chayil is a song? One that's sung on Shabbat. A rather lovely one? Umm. I didn't know that.
So anyway, here's a lovely presentation of Eishet Chayil performed by Ohad moskovits, mendi jerufi, amiran dvir & yshai lapidot. It's a little shmaltzy for me, but hey. It isn't worse than the Titanic version.
Piah pascha - eshes chayil
You can catch a bunch of other version on YouTube and get the lyrics in Hebrew and English from Project Z'mirot.
By the way, in addition to Eishet Chayil being a Shabbat standard, it seems to be a wedding favorite. I saw a number of videos on YouTube that featured new husbands singing it to their new wives during their wedding reception [Video 1] [Video 2]. Very cute.
HatTip to YouTube user MDBFriends for posting the video and to Gerson Veroba for his comment that prompted all of this.
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