Conte fantastique for Harp and String Quartet

Caplet's Conte fantastique (1923) is the most ambitious piece in the harp chamber repertoire, a literary tone poem inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death depicting a doomed masked ball through music of astonishing imagination and technical resource. The harp — played using both natural harmonics and complex pedal changes — represents the narrator-stranger Death, while the string quartet portrays the revellers whose frantic dances become increasingly desperate as the tolling clock marks the approach of midnight. Caplet was Debussy's closest pupil and copyist, and the work's harmonic language — whole-tone scales, modal inflections, and post-Impressionist shimmer — is among the most sophisticated in French chamber music.