Berlioz' Rat (score & parts) - 4BSN

Berlioz' Rat
for bassoon quartet
by Chuck Holdeman

This work is a set of variations on "Brander's Song" from Berlioz' The Damnation of Faust. In the original, the student Brander is accompanied primarily by four bassoons. The arrangement of the theme incorporates some material originally scored for other instruments, and the tine is an octave above the original. The song, a humorous grotesquerie, concerns a gluttonous kitchen rat who dies with much writhing and panting after being poisoned by the cook.