Ideals of the French Revolution is the unusual title of this two-disc set by
Kent Nagano and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal of music by
Beethoven with texts by
Goethe,
Matthisson, and
Paul Griffiths. The second, fairly conventional disc includes three works by
Beethoven that could reasonably be said to embody the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité: his Fifth Symphony, excerpts from his incidental music for
Goethe's Egmont, and his fourth setting of
Matthisson's Opferlied (Song of Sacrifice). The far less conventional first disc, however, features a single work, called The General, setting a text by the aforementioned
Griffiths, noted author and
Beethoven scholar, to music drawn from
Beethoven's incidental music for Egmont, König Stephan, and Leonore Prohaska, plus the Opferlied. The General tells the tale of Roméo Dallaire, the officer in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994 who watched the country collapse into chaos and anarchy while he was refused the men and material to prevent it. What this story has to do with the Ideals of the French Revolution is, it has to be admitted, a bit obscure. Perhaps more importantly, it must also be acknowledged that to some listeners at least, the notion of refashioning the works of so great a master as
Beethoven may seem dangerously close to aesthetic blasphemy.