3. Snow White: Katie Macdonald & Thomas Eeckhout

Music by Takemitsu, Musgrave, Dove, Poulenc, Wolf, Schubert, Berg and others.

Katie Macdonald and Thomas Eeckhout have chosen Snow White as their tale around which to build their programme. They write:

When choosing a Grimm fairy tale, the story of Snow White appealed to us the most. This was not so much because of the actual plot, but rather because of the different characters of the story and the way they represent existential problems and archetypal themes. Therefore, we wanted to make a programme that presented the different characters and elements of the story as well as their symbolical meaning. We were also interested in showing less obvious sides of each character, so as to make them more interesting and three-dimensional.  

Snow White for us seemed to stand for innocence and pureness of nature, from which she derives her beauty. The queen and the object that torments her, the mirror, deal with existential self-doubt and the fear of not being loved. Mario Vargas Llosa’s poem Song of the Dry Orange Tree describes this emotional state in a magnificent way.  

The dwarf in his turn is an element of surprise. In this fairy tale the dwarves fulfil a positive role, but in others the dwarf, elf or imp can be a very treacherous and dark creature indeed. Other elements that found their way into the recital were sleep, the witch, the prince and the apple.  

We wanted to end with what we thought was the key theme of Snow White: the queen’s incapacity to accept oneself as one is. Schubert’s terrifying song 'Der Doppelgänger' portrays this existential, highly anxious obsession with the self magnificently and seemed to us to be an adequately grim ending to this recital.