Goethe’s ‘Urworte.Orphisch’ Set to Music by Bernd Richard Deutsch

To open the season this weekend, Franz Welser-Möst leads the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the American premiere of Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s ambitious, nearly-hour-long Urworte, which sets Goethe’s famous stanzas to music.

Movements:

Daimon: Dämon (Demon) Tyche: Das Zufällige (The Accidental)Eros: Liebe (Love) Ananke: Nötigung (Necessity) —Elpis: Hoffnung (Hope)

Sunday’s concert will be livestreamed on Adella, digital home of The Cleveland Orchestra.

My introduction to the work can be found in the Cleveland Orchestra program notes here.

Composers often set aside ideas that strike them in a flash of inspiration, waiting until the right moment arrives to wrestle them down in detail and give them an enduring form. For Bernd Richard Deutsch, one such idea was to write a work exploring the elemental forces that shape our lives….
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