Gustave DoréThe Enigma© RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Jean Schormans
A brilliant illustrator, his ambition was to put the world’s literary classics into images, from the Bible to Dante, Ariosto and Cervantes. Fairy tales, fables, poetry, novels, nothing escaped his craving for images, and just before he died he was planning to illustrate Hoffmann and Shakespeare.
It is this aspect of his work that the concerts will reflect. Just as 19th century musicians turned to literature for inspiration for a new musical discourse, lovers of fairy tales and of ancient and modern literature will find something here to enjoy.
It is also a genre which, produced in a small, fragmented and fragmentary form, results in a great work: the song cycle, just like the engravings which, page after page, recreate the world of a writer or a poet. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler would illustrate a genre that was to blossom through Romanticism. The fact that composers chose the poetry of landscape echoes the place of nature in Doré’s engravings, a reminder that it is above all through landscape that music finds common ground with Romantic painting and literature.
