Reinecke’s “Undine sonata” for flute and piano gets a new “reading” through eyes of pianist Minka Popovic. This composition was inspired by the Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novel Undine in which Undine, a water spirit, marries a knight named Huldebrand in order to gain a soul. Fouqué explores the predicament of the knight Huldbrand, torn between the passionate love of the elemental Undine and the calmer, more predictable affection of the completely human Bertalda. The antitheses of earth and water, courtly castle and rural simplicity, Christian values and dark malevolence overlap in disturbing ways. Finally, in a quarrel between the three on the River Danube, Kühleborn seizes Undine and takes her back to the realm of water from which she came. After Huldbrand has recovered from the shock, his plans to marry Bertalda are resisted by both her father, the old fisherman, and Father Heilmann. However, despite disturbing dreams Huldbrand determines to go ahead. Bertalda has the well in the castle courtyard reopened in order to get water to wash away the freckles that betray her lowly origins, but Undine reappears out of it and embraces Huldbrand with the kiss of death.
The story is descended from Melusine, the French folk-tale of a water-spirit who marries a knight on condition that he shall never see her on Saturdays, when she resumes her mermaid shape. It was also inspired by works by the occultist Paracelsus. All these stories grow, possibly, out of older mythologies about seal women, common in world mythology from early times; Celtic stories about selkies and the Finish Kalevala's fish-woman tale are of this genre. This ballad maintained its essence but changed “costumes” to play in many writer’s fantasies: from Goethe to Andersen, and from Wilde to Giraudoux and Ingeborg Bachmann. With Bachmann, Undine gets her own (distinctly female) voice , narrative is changing and for the first time in literature-universe she is speaking in first person. Style and genre diversity enriched the cult of Undine, mostly in literature and music.
Check out this visual version of a third movement. After “watery” passages in piano, this stormy weather of Sonate is eased by the third movement romance.
