Classical Music | Ensemble Music

Recorded on 10/22/2011, uploaded on 10/22/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Richard Strauss composed his melodrama Enoch Arden, using a poem of the same name by England’s Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1897, while also working on his symphonic poem Don Quixote. In a manner similar to incidental music, the pianist provides a series of preludes, interludes, and postludes while the narrator recites Tennyson’s poem. The actual musical content of the work is thus rather sparse, and much of the burden of presenting the work falls to the narrator. Nevertheless, Strauss makes use of leitmotifs to represent the characters involved in the narrative.

The poem, written by Tennyson in 1864, is the story of a fisherman named Enoch Arden who finds work as a merchant sailor to support his wife, Annie, and their children. While at sea, he is shipwrecked on a desert island. After ten years, he finally makes his way home only to find Annie happily married to his childhood friend and rival, Philip. Seeing how happy his wife is in her new life, Enoch does not reveal himself to her or his children that he is alive, and then dies of a broken heart.

Enoch Arden was particularly successful following its composition, and helped further Strauss’s reputation as a composer—indeed, even more so than his symphonic poems. Eventually, however, the piece, as well as the melodrama itself, ceased the find favor with audiences, and Enoch Arden was largely neglected. Yet, in recent decades, the work has begun to receive more attention, beginning with a 1962 recording featuring the English actor Claude Rains and pianist Glenn Gould. Other notable names that have recorded Enoch Arden include Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Jon Vickers, and Patrick Stewart as narrators, and Marc-André Hamelin, and Emanuel Ax as pianists.       Joseph DuBose

Istituto Europeo di musica: Dipartimento di drammaturgia. Servizio di filodiffusione di musica classica del sabato e della domenica

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Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Enoch Arden, un melodramma per pianoforte op.38 (1897) : Introduzione

Michael Ducarel (attore)

 Martin Cousin (pianist)