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Description

Description

ECHO Klassik 2006 within the category "World Premiere Recording of the Year".

As if in slow motion, librettist Thornton Wilder summarizes a series of Christmas dinners celebrated by the Bayard family over a period of ninety years and fuses them into a single long meal. The concentration of the characters and their standardization are all things that Hindemith’s setting picks up on: he counterbalanced them musically by means of development, individualization, and variation – thus designing a kind of music that expresses contingency – significant coincidence – as an attitude toward life. The view of what Wilder calls the "mill of time" is thus always a view of the future as well – whether we perceive that as misfortune or consolation or both at once.

Content

Opera in one act
Libretto by Thornton Wilder
German version by Paul Hindemith
Recording of the German version
Booklet contains libretto in German, English and French

Downloads

Awards

2006 | Echo Klassik

2006, World Premiere Recording of the Year

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Christmas > listen