Le Destin

Since Le Destin was composed for the stage, it is important to recall Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842). ‘The Red Death’ describes a plague sweeping through an imaginary land. Its victims are gripped by convulsive agony, and they sweat blood instead of water. It kills within half an hour. Yet Prince Prospero disregards the sufferings of his people, and seeks refuge with a thousand revellers in castellated monastery.

On 18 June 1936 the composer wrote some comments in the piano reduction, presumably for the benefit of the choreographer: ‘The Masque of the Red Death may, in an ideological sense, be interpreted as the embodiment of the idea of the unequal struggle between man and his fate, and for this reason I called the work “Fate”.’ (Nikolai Tcherepnin)