Blond Eckbert
The composer wrote the English-language libretto herself, basing it on the cryptic supernatural short story Der blonde Eckbert by the German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck.
Weir completed the original two-act version of the opera in 1993, making Blond Eckbert her third full-length work in the genre.
[2] In the story, both the landscape and the variations in the song sung by the magic bird mirror the changing moods of the characters.
[3] A constant motif in the song is the concept of forest solitude or Waldeinsamkeit, a word Tieck coined in the story to stand for Romantic joy at being alone in nature.
The ruin of the protagonist involves the breaking down of the barriers between the world of the supernatural and that of everyday life,[4] leaving the reader unable to tell where one end and the other begins.
The New York Times critic Bernard Holland describes the plot as "inscrutable" and "full of effects but bereft of causes".
In looking for an explanation, he suggests that the figure of Walther in his various forms is a representation of memory and his murder as a sign of how what is remembered is intolerable.
This overeagerness to impose sense on nonsense ends up compromising a story meant more to be beheld than understood.
[1] The whimsy can be illustrated by Berthe describing the bird's song in terms of instruments in Weir's orchestra, ("you would have thought the horn and the oboe were playing",) and by a parody of the Tieck's Waldeinsamkeit verse in which the bird instructed to sing the line "Alone in the wood, I don't feel so good" as if airsick.
In 2003, the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra gave a concert performance of the opera with slide projections.
The percussion consists of glockenspiel, suspended cymbal, xylophone, tenor drum, bell or small gong and three differently pitched cowbells.
[1] When interviewed for the programme notes to the first production, Weir placed herself musically more in a Stravinskian tradition than one based on Britten.
Much of the vocal writing consists of short phrases of speech song, written more to support the text than to be musically interesting in itself.
[13] Andrew Clark of the Financial Times also feels that more might have been made of the work by providing orchestral interludes or extended vocal numbers.
[15] Writing in Grove, David C. H. Wright sees a deliberate strategy in the understatement of much of the music: the conclusion of the opera, with the orchestra providing the composer's commentary on events, is all the more powerful because of the contrast with the first act.
[1] A film featuring the same cast, adapted by Margaret Williams from Tim Hopkins's ENO production, was broadcast by Channel 4[18] and later shown at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
