The Nightingale

Description

Narrator, Instrument — Hans Christian Andersen's “Nightingale” is not just a delightful story for children, it also exercises its charm over adults. It has a lot more to it than just Andersen's captivating narrative style: it tells of the opposition of nature and culture--an opposition which is as old as humanity itself, but which has developed into a problem of enormous proportions in our time, as technological advances threaten to destroy nature. Andersen's attitude to this problem is reflected dearly in his fairy story: the emperor is cured by the song of the true nightingale; the artificial one fails him, although it seems reliable. In 1973, the stage director Erik Vos asked me to write the music for a series of music theatre performances of Andersen's Nightingale. Stravinsky's “Soldier's Tale” was also part of the program of this series. For this purely practical reason, the same instrumentation is used in “The Nightingale” as in “The Soldier's Tale”. In “Soldier's Tale,” the violin is the most prominent instrument, whereas the clarinet plays the most important part in “The Nightingale;” as the clarinet is the only instrument in the ensemble which can suggest the coloratura of a nightingale. In contrast to the clarinet part, which sounds almost like an imprvisation, the music of the artificial nightingale, played by the trumpet, bassoon, glockenspiel, triangle and pizzicato strings, is more or less a demonstration of automatised music. The Chinese Court Musician prefers this kind of music; he doesn't want to take any risks. In his unbounded overestimation of mankind's technical prowess, the Court Musician doesn't realize that nature also repeats herself, but in a much more beautiful and more varied way, even if it is on a level beyond our human ken. A Chinese Court Musician really should have known better ... --Theo Loevendie