Muerte y despedida del Dios Brotan
(Espectáculo "Los clásicos de Les Luthiers" en inglés)

Marcos Mundstock:

The organizers of this recital beg the forgiveness of the audience in the face of the possible difficulties of comprehension which the reading of these texts may give rise to. It so happens that the person who is addressing you doesn't understand a word of what he's reading.

We will begin this recital with a work by Hans Glockenkranz, a composer born in München, the capital of Bavaria. Hans Glockenkranz's mother, named Anneliese Glockenkranz, was a woman of great beauty, a great lover of music, of painting and of poets. Han's father... was away at war. One day, at the age of two, tiny Hans went over to the piano and clumsily tried to imitate a tune he'd heard somewhere. Exactly as he would do throughout his entire career as a composer. While still a teenager, he composed the first of his famous works: the popular hymn dedicated to his native Bavaria, entitled: "O beer, thy quality is unbavariable".

But his paramount achievement is constituted by an imposing tetralogy based on one particular side of the legend of the Nibelungs: their magic ring. Therefore he called it: "The ring side of the Nibelungs". The first of these four operas, which was intended as a prologue to the tetralogy, has never been performed. Which is specially regrettable because the second opera is suspected to be apocryphal, the third has mysteriously been lost, and Glockenkranz's death prevented him from composing the fourth.

The fragment we shall now hear belongs precisely to that fourth opera. We refer to "Death and farewell - in that order - of the god Brotan". For the depth of the dramatic conflict to be fully understood by an English-speaking audience, this version includes the services of a simultaneous translator. Let's hear Les Luthiers in "Death and farewell - in that order - of the god Brotan" from "The ring-side of the Nibelungs" by Hans Glockenkranz.