Arts
What is Gurrelieder? Arnold Schoenberg’s massive cantata, or oratorio, or symphonic psychodrama, is technically a song cycle, presenting ‘Songs of Gurre’, a small Danish settlement best known for its crumbling medieval castle. A five-part sequence of naturalist poems, by the Danish ‘Modern Breakthrough’ writer and botanist Jens Peter Jacobsen, became the text of Schoenberg’s cycle, in a lacklustre German translation by Robert Franz Arnold, to which Schoenberg made few revisions.
... (read more)Famously, Gustav Mahler once told Jean Sibelius that ‘[a] symphony must be like the world – it must contain everything.’ Running for more than ninety minutes, indeed often cited as the longest symphonic work in the standard orchestral repertoire, his third essay in this genre (first performed in its entirety in 1902, conducted by Mahler) arguably gets closest to realising such an ambition. The composer suggested, furthermore, that the work was inspired by the contemplation of a soul’s journey from the natural world to the spiritual, no less.
... (read more)Gaslight
Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father)
For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation.
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