Sound fictions

Literary imagination at the piano

The relation between literature and musical works, where composition shapes its characters, runs through the narratives of all times. In this recital, artistic interpretation materializes through the piano in an almost literal translation of literary fictions into sound. In the first part, Debussy offers pointillist illustrations that describe the settings and subjects of the stories with a caricatured but faithful stroke. His Preludes stage a parade of characters who live in the literary imagination of their author, from dreamlike prints and imaginary landscapes to prototypes of the Commedia dell'arte. The succession of these short pieces becomes a gallery of sound images in which Rackham's tales, forest nymphs and eccentric clowns fleetingly leave the pages of a book. Schumann's great ability to turn music into narrative translates directly from Hoffmann's pen a series of interwoven stories into the eight fantasies that make up the Kreisleriana for piano. Starting from a whimsical and dramatic plot that simultaneously combines two stories, the music oscillates violently between agitation and lyrical calm, between fear and euphoria, to portray the extravagant adventures of the protagonists, Johannes Kreisler and the cat Murr. Histrionics and bipolarity lead a succession of ironic events that are concatenated and trampled capriciously before being concluded. Schumann manages to revive musically and structurally the unmistakable nineteenth-century genre of the double novel and to please the dualities of his own personality.