Le Destin op. 59 (1938)

Since Le Destin is in fact music for the stage, it is important to recall the subject matter of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, which was written in 1842. “The Red Death” is a term used to describe a plague sweeping through an imaginary land. Its victims are gripped by convulsive agony and sweat blood instead of water. It kills within half an hour. Yet Prince Prospero disregards the sufferings of his people, and seeks refuge with a thousand revellers in castellated monastery. On 18 June 1936 the composer wrote some comments in French in the piano reduction of Le Destin, presumably for the benefit of the choreographer: . . . The Masque of the Red Death may, in an ideological sense, be interpreted as the embodiment of the idea of the unequal struggle between man and his fate, and for this reason I called the work Fate (. . .) There is a close interrelationship between both the music of the episode and its subsequent development and Edgar Allan Poe's ballad.