Pianist Anthony Davis and his Episteme ensemble perform two lengthy and complex pieces ("Still Waters" and "Undine") that mix together aspects of avant-garde jazz and contemporary classical music. Davis' group includes J.D. Parran on flute, clarinet and contrabass clarinet, Marty Ehrlich on clarinet, bass clarinet and flute, cellist Abdul Wadud and percussionist Gerry Hemingway, plus bassoon and violin. Unusual music (reissued on CD) that takes a few listens to fully absorb. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide
Undine is a novel by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué concerning Undine, a water spirit who marries a Knight named Huldebrand in order to gain a soul. It is an early German romance, which has been translated into English and other languages. During the nineteenth century the book was very popular and was, according to The Times in 1843, "a book which, of all others, if you ask for it at a foreign library, you are sure to find engaged"[1]. The story, which has resemblances to The Little Mermaid by Andersen, is descended from Melusine, the French folk-tale of a water-sprite who marries a knight on condition that he shall never see her on Saturdays, when she resumes her mermaid shape. It was also inspired by a text of Paracelsus.[2] An unabridged English edition of the story published in 1909 was illustrated by Arthur Rackham. George Macdonald thought Undine "the most beautiful" of all fairy stories, and the references to it in such works as Charlotte Yonge'sThe Daisy Chain and Louisa Alcott'sLittle Women show that it was one of the best loved of all books for many 19th-century children.
The first adaptation of Undine was E.T.A. Hoffmann's opera in 1814. It was a collaboration between E.T.A. Hoffman, who composed the score, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué who adapted his own work into a libretto. The opera proved highly successful and in his review of Hoffmann's opera, Carl Maria von Weber admired it as the kind of composition which the German desires - 'an art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world'[3].[4]
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