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| Tuesday, January 19
LeBaron and Poe Today is the birthday of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was born in Boston on this date in 1809. His troubled life ended 39 years later, in October of 1849, shortly after he was found delirious in a Baltimore gutter -- but not before he had written and published a remarkable series of poems and short stories which would eventually bring him world-wide fame. Poe was a master of the macabre, and his first collection of stories was entitled, appropriately enough: "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." One of the stories in that collection, "The Fall of the House of Usher," inspired an unfinished opera by the French composer Claude Debussy and a completed one by the American composer Philip Glass. In the century following his death, many other composers have found musical inspiration in the fantastic tales of Mr. Poe. A chamber work for violin and piano by the American composer Anne LeBaron takes its inspiration and title from Poe�s short story "The Devil in the Belfry," in which a mysterious foreign fiddler shakes up the clockwork formality and rigid conformity of a Dutch village by conjuring its belltower to strike 13. Just as Poe never specifies the origins of his trickster, so LeBaron injects what sounds variously like Eastern European waltzes, Irish jigs, jazz, and tangos against the more rigid clockwork patterns in her chamber piece. |  | Music Played on Today's Program: Additional Information:
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