Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Oehms Classics label (OC571) is Robert Schumann’s dramatic, declamatory setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine, Belsazar (Belshazzar). The song relates the biblical story of the proud Babylonian King Belshazzar who desecrated the sacred vessels of Jehovah and to whom there appeared writing on the wall that he could not understand – an ill omen for the one who read it. The last line is set as a distanced epilogue with its final disclosure: Belshazzar’s death by the hand of his own servant.