Schubert – La jeune fille et la mort

Discogs

The Quatuor Enesco is a French string quartet based in Paris. It was founded in 1979 and recorded many quartets, with an emphasis on later works. According to the helpful wiki page they have a whole host of contemporary composers that dedicated works to them. If I read all of that I’m thinking the record of today is a bit out of place. It is neither French nor contemporary. They might be forgiven: they made it four years in their existence.

This is the French name for Der Tod und das Mädchen, or Death and the Maiden. Why is the French reversing the order? The title in German comes from a poem by Matthias Claudius, put initially in a song by Schubert. There it is the character of the seducing Death that enters the scene first. It sounds a bit like the French idiom puts the maiden, the human element of the two first. So it is the maiden that faces death. In German it is death is seducing the maiden, making him the active character. It is all about the details!

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