*** Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss

E.T.A. HOFFMANN: ARLEQUIN BALLET, OVERTURES

(Arsis)

The great German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann composed music as well as the short stories and novels for which he's famous -- in his own time, in fact, he was also famous as a music critic, one esteemed by no less than Beethoven. Now, almost two centuries later, German record labels are finally beginning to take up his case. For all his devotion to Mozart (he changed his third given name, Wilhelm, to Amadeus), you won't do him any favors by playing his Das Kreuz an der Ostsee ("The Cross on the Baltic") Overture immediately after, say, the Overture to Don Giovanni -- an undiscovered genius he's not. But like his literary alter ego, the conductor Johannes Kreisler, he's just quirky and original enough to be worth a listen.

This new release offers music from four stage works: the opera Das Kreuz an der Ostsee, the ballet Arlequin, the opera Der Trank der Unsterblichkeit ("The Drink of Immortality"), and the singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht ("Love and Jealousy"). Mostly Hoffmann looks back to the likes of Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart, but there are anticipations of Bruckner in the wind chorale of Das Kreuz's sinfonia and Wagner in the "March of the Teutonic Knights," and the 20 short, picturesque selections that make up the Arlequin ballet look ahead to Schumann's Papillons and Carnaval. The more spontaneous writing in the overtures from Der Trank der Unsterblichkeit and Liebe und Eifersucht even conjures briefly Mozart's comic operas.

Hoffmann is also represented on disc by recordings of his piano sonatas (cpo), his Miserere and Symphony in E-flat (Koch/Schwann), and his operas Aurora (Bayer Records) and Undine (Bayer Records, Koch/Schwann, and Living Stage). This cpo release is generously annotated, but the back cover gives it a different title ("Music for the Stage") and provides inaccurate track information, and though Caspar David Friedrich is a fine choice for any Hoffmann CD booklet, you'd think cpo would have selected Friedrich's The Cross on the Baltic rather than the unrelated Mountain Landscape with Rainbow.

-- Jeffrey Gantz

(See Jeffrey's review of a new translation of Hoffmann's novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.)