ORR232_ Book.qxd

Des Himmels schönster Stern erhellt Heaven’s most beautiful star lights up
Die Liebe unsrer Nacht. the love of our night.
O läs’ ich in dem Sternenheer Oh, I leave to that host of stars
Das Schicksal uns’rer Liebe! the fate of our love!
Ob nahe seine Wiederkehr? I wonder if he will return soon?
Und ob er treu mir bliebe? And does he remain true to me?
Hector Berlioz
Poem by Victor Hugo
‘La captive’ Op. 12 (1832) (The captive girl) [CD 2 Track 13]
FREDERICA VON STADE, DAVID WATKIN (CELLO)
COMPOSED IN 1832, Berlioz’s setting of Victor Hugo’s poem was one of his
first successful works. It was dedicated to the singer Louise Vernet, who
performed it in Rome the same year. The song, in its later arrangement with
orchestral accompaniment, featured in Pauline Viardot’s repertory, and she
first sang it, with the composer conducting, at a concert in London in 1848.
It was in Baden in 1859 that Viardot sang extracts from the roles of Cassandra
and Dido in Berlioz’s Les Troyens. The composer found in her his ideal
interpreter and woman, and, like Turgenev, he fell in love with her, telling her,
‘this ideal…the fantastic figment of an insane imagination has suddenly
materialised to my dying heart’.
–88–