MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Humperdinck: Moorish Rhapsody / Sleeping Beauty / etc

Humperdinck wrote his Moorish Rhapsody in 1898 and it was first performed at the Leeds Festival in that year. "The Elegy at Sunset" (Elegie bei Sonnenuntergang), set at Tarifa, is gently evocative, something of a Moorish atmosphere created by the use of the cor anglais. More overt melodic reference is made to North Africa in Tangiers, where the scene is a cheerful Moorish coffee-house, musically not entirely remote from Germany, the jollity brought to a close by the bassoon. The Rhapsody ends with a ride in the desert, at Tetuan, the world of Sheherazade now more overtly suggested by the turns of melody.