92. Tall Tales And Tattles For Piano

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann – author of fairy tales, fantasy stories, and horror stories, as well as a critic and composer – had an enormous influence on both Romantic literature and music. Robert Schumann immortalized one of his characters, the conductor Kreisler, in his Kreisleriana cycle, and Jacques Offenbach also drew on his writings in the opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Earlier, however, a collection of ten pieces under nearly the same title – Fantastic Tales of Hoffmann – was published by Juliette Dillon, a composer, organist, pianist, and music critic who, sadly, died in 1854 at the age of just 31. For the first miniature, she chose one of the author’s most famous musical tales – about the luthier Councilor Crespel and his daughter Antonia, who was killed by singing. Claude Debussy, too, was fascinated by the fairy-tale world. For example, the prelude Ondine is a response to Arthur Rackham’s illustration for Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fairy tale of the same title (and Hoffmann himself had previously written an opera based on this story!). Les collines d’Anacapri and La Puerta del Vino were inspired by real places, which, however, might just as well have been fairy-tale settings, since Debussy never saw them in person – to him, they were simply beautiful and exotic. The Joyful Island also exists – it is the Greek island of Kythira, dedicated to Aphrodite – though the composer was primarily interested in its painterly depiction in Antoine Watteau’s painting, with its courtly lightness.

– Dominika Micał (pisanezesluchu.pl)