Tales of Music — Part 3: Councillor Krespel

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Tales of Music — Part 3: Councillor Krespel | KacheliTV World Classics Part Three of Tales of Music, the KacheliTV shelf of stories in which music itself does the work, brings a single tale told whole: "Councillor Krespel" by E. T. A. Hoffmann — the tale J. T. Bealby's translation calls "The Cremona Violin". Councillor Krespel, a lawyer in the town of H——, builds his house without any plan at all, makes the finest violins of his age only to take them to pieces, and keeps his daughter Antonia — by every account the most wonderful singer alive — silent under his roof. A young law student who has fallen in love with her voice without ever having heard it resolves to learn the reason why; and the answer, when it comes at last, is the history of a marriage, of a window scarcely five feet from the ground, and of an old master's violin that could only live with her, and in her. A tale in which music does not accompany the plot, but is the plot. Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices. Chapters 02:03 The House That Krespel Built 18:36 Antonia 29:06 The Funeral 39:29 The Councillor's Story A note on the telling: the tale is a frame story, and its shadows are told, not shown. Its one rough act — a wife put out of a ground-floor window onto soft grass, "scarcely five feet from the ground" — belongs to the Councillor's own confession of twenty years before the frame, told by him as comedy, with no hurt done and none described; and Antonia's end is a decline, presented as the tale presents it and never enacted. The tale's funeral chorale and church music are its scenery and its craft; nothing is preached. Music: 'Gangster Piano Symphony' (instrumental theme) opens and closes the programme and sounds briefly between the movements, and the same recording plays softly beneath the narration throughout. Source: E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Councillor Krespel" (1818), translated by J. T. Bealby as "The Cremona Violin", in Weird Tales, Vol. I (1885), Project Gutenberg eBook #31377. Public domain. Recorded for KacheliTV. KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.