About this Piece

A friend of both Debussy and Ravel (he beat out the latter for the Prix de Rome in 1901), André Caplet was most widely appreciated in his lifetime as a conductor. He led many of Debussy’s premieres, both in France and in Boston, where he conducted the opera company during four seasons before World War I.  

After the war, Caplet focused more on composition. A war hero gassed in the trenches at Verdun, he found himself without the stamina to maintain a full conducting calendar, though he was on the podium for the French premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in 1922. His weakened lungs led directly to his early death when a common cold turned into fatal pleurisy. 

Caplet’s interest in Edgar Allan Poe could have been inspired by either Debussy or Ravel, though the American master of the macabre was widely influential throughout contemporary French artistic and literary circles. Debussy left two late operas based on Poe stories unfinished, and Ravel cited Poe’s essay The Philosophy of Composition as guiding his own aesthetic development: “Poe taught me that true art is found at the exact midpoint between intellect and feeling.” 

Caplet’s Conte fantastique (Fantastic tale) is a tone poem depicting Poe’s famous short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” It has a creative foot on both sides of World War I, beginning life as a Legende for harp and orchestra in 1908. In 1923 Caplet returned to the piece, paring the orchestra down to string quartet (with optional bass), revising the harp part, making an alternative solo part for piano, and retitling it.  

In any form it is an edgy, eerie tour de force of enormous expressive power. Caplet evokes faithfully both the ominous atmosphere and the specific details of Poe’s tale, up to the fateful midnight knocking at the door and chiming of the hour. He plays rhythmic games with the fevered waltzes of the masked ball and unleashes the dark side of the harp, playing against its gentle typecasting. —John Henken