{"id":1088,"date":"2013-09-24T03:35:13","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T02:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geraldgarcia.com\/wordpress\/?p=1088"},"modified":"2013-10-30T14:49:03","modified_gmt":"2013-10-30T14:49:03","slug":"reisigers-waltz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/?p=1088","title":{"rendered":"Rei\u00dfiger’s Waltz"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Carl Maria von Weber<\/a> died in 1826, amongst his belongings was a manuscript which came to be known as “Weber’s Last Waltz” although it was actually by Carl Gottlieb Rei\u00dfiger<\/a> an ex-student of Salieri who succeeded Weber as Kappellmeister at the court of Dresden.
\nThis waltz became extremely popular amongst pianists, and is primarily of interest to guitarists because it was the favourite piece of the eponymous Roderick Usher of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”
\n<\/a>“his heart is a suspended lute, as soon as it is touched, it resounds”<\/em> -quote from “Le Refus<\/a>” (1831) by the French songwriter Pierre-Jean de B\u00e9ranger<\/a> (1780\u20131857)
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Roderick composed his own music based on it and the narrator describes it as “a … singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber”. The waltz is hardly wild, and Usher plays it on the guitar as the house collapses around him (another literary reference<\/a> for the ongoing blog), so he must have done something rather special to it to make it sound interesting.
\nPoe’s tale is a masterpiece of Gothic fiction, with foreboding in every sentence, Roderick’s split personality, a creepy mirroring of Roderick’s poem The Mad Tryst <\/em>and events around the narrator, a hasty burial of the twin sister etc etc
\nHere is Rei\u00dfiger’s original
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