Sony Red Seal has just released a recording of Manorbier resident Paul Griffiths's The General. 

A work for orchestra, narrator, soprano, and chorus, The General brings together all of the music Beethoven composed for Goethe's heroic drama Egmont, with a new drama about a contemporary hero. (The Egmont Overture is the only part of the original work that is still regularly performed.) 

Griffiths also resurrected and included some rarely heard theatre music written by Beethoven for other occasions, and an elegiac choral finale that is otherwise almost never performed.  

The General was commissioned by American conductor Kent Nagano to mark his first season (2006-2007) as music director of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra.

In 2005, Nagano asked Griffiths to write a text about a French Canadian hero, an individual well-known to the people of Montréal: Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, head of the United Nations 'peace-keeping' mission during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. 

In the CD booklet, Griffiths describes the task as 'an attempt to create a new drama between actor and orchestra... that will carry, for modern audiences, the weight of recent events, and that resituates Beethoven's music - Beethoven's hope - in the world of the present, even at a moment of extreme inhumanity.'

Originally recorded for the Canadian label Analekta in both English and in Griffiths's own French translation, The General now appears in English only, with the full text in the booklet.

The title role is performed by Maximilian Schell, who in 1961 became the second youngest actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Judgement at Nuremberg.

The release coincides with the European premiere of The General in Munich, in German translation. At the end of last month, Der General was performed twice in the Bavarian National Theatre by Nagano with the Bavarian State Orchestra before sold-out houses of 2,200. The event marks a moment of great openness on the part of the German audience inasmuch as Griffiths's text -both the narrative and the song lyrics - replaces an original by one of the greatest writers in German history. (The recording includes versions of the songs with their original words.) The viability of the new piece proves, as Griffiths writes in the booklet, 'how forcefully Beethoven can speak to us–we who live, as he did, in a time of vast political disappointment, rapid technological advance, and incessant war.'

Also included in the two - CD album - which is titled The Ideals of the French Revolution - is a powerful but graceful and nuanced performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

The Ideals of the French Revolution may be ordered on amazon.co.uk.