Release Date: 05 January 2002
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313535521
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: Date with the Devil
Description
A Date with the DevilThe Devil has long had a leading part to play in drama and in music,either menacing mortals in a medieval miracle play or leading romantic heroesand heroines into difficulties in the world of romantic opera. The nineteenthcentury found a particular fascination in the character of the Devil, asupposed source of diabolical inspiration for a Paganini or a Liszt or aprincipal figure in Faustian legend.Dr Faustus himself, perhaps based on the early scientist andexperimenter Paracelsus, found his place in German legend and in a moralpublication of 1587 that warned of the dangers of intellectual speculation.This was the source of Christopher Marlowe's play, in which the good doctor,true to story, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a period of youth andconsequent pleasure. In the following century the Devil acquires heroic staturein Milton's Paradise Lost toreturn with less ambiguity in Goethe's great poetic drama, the source of somuch else in music and opera.It is Goethe who is the source of inspiration for the French composerHector Berlioz, with his >Eight Scenes fromFaust, written in 1828 and 1829 under the impact of the translationof the first part of Goethe's Faust byGerard de Nerval, which had appeared in 1827. In 1845 Berlioz returned to thesubject, revising the earlier scenes and incorporating them into his dramaticlegend La damnation de Faust ('TheDamnation of Faust'), described as an operade concert, which has also lent itself to staging. The text for thelater work, still based on de Nerval, was adapted to its new purpose by AlmireGandonni?¿re and the composer, and the new composition was first heard in aconcert performance by the Opera-Comique in Paris in December 1846. The firststaging was in Monte Carlo in 1893. Berlioz considered, for a time,commissioning a new libretto for an opera under the title Mephistophel?¿s but the idea came tonothing.It was in February 1846 that Berlioz introduced the public in Pesth toa new composition that had an immediate appeal to Hungarian patriotism, thenreaching a new pitch of enthusiasm. He had been advised to write somethingbased on a Hungarian national melody and had happily chosen Rakoczy, with its overt nationalistassociations, to create the Rakoczy March. Thiswas to form part of the work on which he was now working at every availablemoment during his concert tour of Germany and Austria and in the months thatfollowed Faust is first found in Hungary, allowing the march a new place. Inthe second part, rejuvenated by the Devil Mephistopheles, now his companionuntil his final damnation, from which there is to be no redemption,Mephistopheles entertains the students in Auerbach's cellar in Leipzig with Une puce gentille ('A delightful flea'), asong taken unchanged from the Eight Scenes, TheDevil's Serenade, from the thirdpart, provides an interlude in Faust's courtship of Marguerite.Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable('Robert the Devil') deals with another kind of devilry. Stagedfi
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yaqi Yang; Margarita Parsamyan; Robynne Redmon; Minghao Liu; Frank Ragsdale; Kim Josephson; Kevin S
Vilmos Csikos; Olivier Lechardeur; Manon Lamaison
Tomas Cotik; Martingale Ensemble; Ken Selden
