Letzte Kapitel

Erich Kastner (G,E), English translations by the composer and Bernard Keeffe

Goldschmidt composed these two settings of satires by Erich Kästner (author of Emil and the Detectives) in 1931 but they remained unperformed until 1984. The first, A Masked Ball in the Mountains, describes a party in which the guests, representatives of a shallow, bourgeois society, are swept away by an avalanche, while the second, Letzte Kapitel, is Kästner’s prediction of a world annihilated by chemical warfare in the year 2003. Although not an overtly ‘political’ work, the socio-topical concerns of Letzte Kapitel are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s.