Ah! ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit, ou le pendu qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire?
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three works suitable for Halloween, all of them by French composers.
Sir John Gielgud will join pianist Gina Bachauer for recitations of weird and sinister poems by Aloysius Bertrand, to preface the three movements of Maurice Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” (Gaspard of the Night).
Claude Debussy was enthralled by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, which he knew through translations by Charles Baudelaire. At the time of his death, he left incomplete sketches for two operas after Poe stories – “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Devil in the Belfry.” We’ll hear fragments of the former, conducted by Georges Prêtre.
Finally, we’ll listen to the third of the “Etudes in Minor Keys,” subtitled “Scherzo Diabolico,” by Charles-Valentin Alkan. Alkan, a sometimes neighbor of Chopin and Georges Sand, shared a home with his illegitimate son, two apes and a hundred cockatoos. Franz Liszt is alleged to have commented, “Alkan had the finest technique I had ever known, but preferred the life of a recluse.”
Best known is the legend surrounding the circumstances of his death: while reaching for a copy of the Talmud, which was positioned on a high shelf, the bookcase let go and crushed Alkan beneath it. It’s been suggested that he really collapsed while in the kitchen, but when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
I hope you’ll join me for “Jacques o’ Lanterns” – lurid music by French composers for Halloween – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
