Ex. 4-15: If I were a bird, I would sing all day.

This is the fourth of Liza Lehmann's Five Little Love Songs, published in London in 1910. All five are set to poems by Cora Fabbri. Lehmann dedicated the set to Berrick von Norden, a tenor who was making records in America in those years.

Cora Fabbri was born in New York in 1871. Her father was Italian and her mother was American. After her father died, the family moved to Florence, and she wrote most of her poems there. In 1891 she fell ill with a lung disease. She prepared her book of poems for printing herself, but she died in January 1892, at 20, ten days before it came out.

In the poem, the speaker imagines being a bird or a small daisy. As a bird, they would sing about the person they love until the whole world heard. As a daisy, they would kiss that person's feet.

Fabbri's poem is called "If," and it has five verses. After the bird and the daisy, the speaker imagines being the wind and a white rose. In the last verse the poem turns into a gentle joke: "if I were you," and saw someone who loved me, I would give them a few smiles. Lehmann set only the first two verses. Then she added a closing verse of her own, which brings the bird and the flower back together. In a short note in the score, signed "L. L.," she explained that this repeat was used only in the song.

IMSLP