Marina Warner: The Voice of the Story

Scheherazade is the principal storyteller, and she is telling stories to save her life and the life of all women. Inside her stories, many voices take up the thread of the book and begin to tell their own, and within this polyphony, there are outbursts of poetry – passionate erotic lyric, political squibs, and bawdy banter, quoted by the narrators often at moments of the greatest intensity in the plot. This varied and exhilarating chorus of voices has inspired many composers to interpret oriental fairytale. Marina Warner will illustrate her talk on the 'Arabian Nights' with examples from Mozart, Schubert, and Hans Werner Henze, among others.