Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien

In 1910 the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote a play about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. He commissioned Claude Debussy to compose the music and the "Mystère en cinq mansions composé en rhythme français" premiered in 1911. It contained 3,938 verses and even in abridged form the performance lasted approximately four and a half hours. The text combines and overlaps Christian and pagan traditions and plays with both the flair of antiquity and the fascination of the exotic. The Catholic Church took offense at the depiction of Sebastian, who was played by a Russian Jewish dancer, Ida Rubinstein, and the audience also responded with restraint, so that neither D'Annunzio's play nor Debussy's music could remain on the repertoire.

Debussy himself was very fond of his work and soon compiled an orchestral suite, the "Fragments symphoniques", which adapted some of the central numbers of the theater music for orchestra. On the other hand, Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht created a kind of concert version in which the text was radically shortened to about 15 minutes of narration alongside Debussy's music. The same applies to the current recording, which places Debussy's original music alongside texts by writer Martin Mosebach. These texts do not necessarily reflect the course of D'Annunzio's play, but rather summarize central aspects of the legend of Saint Sebastian, sometimes more directly, sometimes more abstractly.