Letzte Kapitel
(1930-31) (Final Chapters) 15two settings of poems by Erich Kastner for chamber chorus, speaker, piano and percussion
Duration: 9'
Music Text
Erich Kastner (G,E), English translations by the composer and Bernard Keeffe
Scoring
chamber chorus-speaker-pft-timp-perc(4):glsp/xyl/tgl/wdbl/SD/BD/cyms/tam-t
Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes
for the world.
World Premiere
28/10/1984
Murztaler Werkstatt, Murztaler
Wiener Chor 'La Cappella' / Sibyl Gneis-Urbancic
Repertoire Note
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.
