Crepuscolo Götterämmerung: Song Settings at the Twilight of the Ancien Régime

Crepuscolo Götterämmerung: Song Settings at the Twilight of the Ancien Régime

Jessica Gould, soprano & Eric Hoeprich, clarinet
Diego Cantalupi, romantic guitar
Christoph Hammer, fortepiano

In 1797 the walls of the Venetian Ghetto came tumbling down on orders of Napoleon. Bonaparte's favorite composer, Domenico Maria Puccini, the grandfather of Giacomo and Mozart’s contemporary, receives an American premiere of his precociously bel canto Sei Canzonette. His Czech coeval, Jan Ladislav Dussek, looks back rather than forward, penning a pianistic ode to a decapitated French Queen in The Sufferings of the Queen of France.

The Meyerbeer Hirtenlied and Weber Opus 33 Silvana Variations for clarinet and fortepiano paint a bucolic idyll, while a proto-Wagnerian song cycle by Louis Spohr caps off a program that stands on the ruins of the ghetto, looking forward into a Brave New World of dubious liberation.

This program was premiered at the Accademia Bartolomeo Cristofori in 2016.