Preparation of The Libretto
Ludwig Tieck wrote Der blonde Eckbert in 1796 and had it published in 1797 as part of his Peter Lebrechts Märchen (Peter Lebrecht's Fairy-tales). The story was the earliest example of the genre of Kunstmärchen, or German Romantic literary fairy tales. In the story, both the landscape and the variations in the song sung by the magic bird mirror the changing moods of the characters. A constant motif in the song is the concept of forest solitude or Waldeinsamkeit a word Tieck coined in the story to stand for Romantic joy at being alone in nature. But not everything is joyful, for the story breaks with the fairy-tale tradition of a happy ending. The ruin of the protagonist involves the breaking down of the barriers between the world of the supernatural and that of every day life, leaving the reader unable to tell where one end and the other begins.
Weir replaces the voice of Tieck's narrator with that of the bird. The text consists of a series of nested narratives. The bird tells the story of Eckbert and Berthe to the dog. And in that story, Bertha narrates events in her past and Eckbert reads her letter. New York Times critic Bernard Holland describes the plot as "inscrutable" and "full of effects but bereft of causes". In looking for an explanation, he suggests that the figure of Walther in his various forms is a representation of memory and his murder as a sign of how what is remembered is intolerable. However, having put this explanation forward, Holland then goes on to say of the text "Perhaps it is interpretation-proof. This overeagerness to impose sense on nonsense ends up compromising a story meant more to be beheld than understood."
Anthony Tomassini, another critic at the same paper, describes the opera as "balancing between whimsy and terror". The whimsy can be illustrated by Berthe describing the bird's song in terms of instruments in Weir's orchestra, ("you would have thought the horn and the oboe were playing",) and by a parody of the Tieck's Waldeinsamkeit verse in which the bird instructed to sing the line "Alone in the wood, I don't feel so good" as if airsick.
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