Blond Eckbert
Encyclopedia
Blond Eckbert is an opera
by Scottish composer Judith Weir
. The composer wrote the English-language libretto
herself, basing it on the cryptic supernatural short story Der blonde Eckbert by the German Romantic
writer Ludwig Tieck
. Weir completed the original two act version of the opera in 1993, making Blond Eckbert her third full-length work in the genre. Like its predecessors, it was received well by the critics. She later produced a one act "pocket" version of the work. This uses chamber
forces rather than the full orchestra of the two act version and omits the chorus. The pocket version receives frequent performances, especially in Germany and Austria, while the full version is available in a recording featuring the original cast.
The opera was first performed on 20 April 1994 by English National Opera
at the London Coliseum. This full-length version was expected by the composer to last approximately one hour and twenty minutes, but a recording of the performances takes approximately 65 minutes.
Blond Eckbert was given its American debut by the Santa Fe Opera
in August 1994.
In 2003, the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra
gave a concert performance of the opera with slide projections.
A more lightly scored one-act "pocket" version of the opera, lasting less than an hour, was premiered on the 14th June 2006 at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House
by The Opera Group and subsequently toured. Further performances of the pocket version by various German and Austrian groups have taken place in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
A live recording of the original cast of the two-act version of Blond Eckbert has been released on CD. A film featuring the same cast, adapted by Margaret Williams from Tim Hopkins's ENO production, was broadcast by Channel 4
and later shown at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
.
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.
piccolo
, cor anglais
, bass clarinet
and contrabassoon
,) four horns
, three trumpet
s, three trombone
s, timpani
and one other percussion player, harp
and strings
. The percussion consists of glockenspiel
, suspended cymbal
, xylophone
, tenor drum
, bell
or small gong
and three differently pitched cowbells. The pocket version is written for oboe, 2 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 2 horns, harp, 2 violins, and 2 cellos with no chorus.
Tommasini recognises Weir's musical voice as individual but he considers her to be more interested in consolidating the musical past than innovation or contemporary schools of music. Her music is, in Holland's words, "neither terribly old nor terribly new". While its language is modernist, it does not go far into the realms of dissonance. Tommasini lists Berg
, Messaien, big band jazz and German romanticism as among the influences on her. When interviewed for the programme notes to the first production, Weir placed herself musically more in a Stravinskian tradition than one based on Britten
.
Much of the vocal writing consists of short phrases of speech song, written more to support the text than to be musically interesting in itself. It is accompanied by chordal progressions or brief bursts of melody in the orchestra.
When Tom Service reviewed the chamber version of the opera for the Guardian, he felt that the virtues of Weir's compact musical style and her ability to tell a story with the smallest of musical gestures are even more evident in the later version than in the original.
While Tommasini welcomed the recording of Blond Eckbert and Service is enthusiatic about both its versions, other critics are more ambivalent. Holland finds the work episodic and lacking in development. He recognises Weir's ear for orchestration and graceful writing but feels she could have done more with it. Andrew Clark of the Financial Times
also feels that more might have been made of the work by providing orchestral interludes or extended vocal numbers. However, he also identifies compactness as one of the works virtues.
Writing in Grove, David C. H. Wright sees a deliberate strategy in the understatement of much of the music: the conclusion of the opera, with the orchestra providing the composer's commentary on events, is all the more powerful because of the contrast with the first act.
Berthe describes how she grew up in a poor shepherd's home and how she ran away because she was a burden on her parents who were often angry. She met an old woman in black who led her to her house where were a dog, whose name Berthe has forgotten, and a bird that lays gems for eggs. Eventually Berthe ran away with the gems and the bird which she let free when it began to sing. She returned to her home village to find her parents dead. She bought a home and married Eckbert.
Walther thanks Berthe for telling the tale and says how he can really imagine the bird and the little dog, Strohmian. Both Eckbert and Berthe are amazed at Walther's naming the dog correctly and are terrified at his motives. When Walther goes out the next day, Eckbert follows him with a crossbow.
Act 2. The prelude describes Eckbert's killing of Walther. Eckbert then reads a letter which Berthe wrote as she was dying from the stress of thinking about how Walther knew the dog's name.
In a town, Eckbert meets Hugo, a man who looks like Walther. Hugo comforts Eckbert but then the crowd start accusing Eckbert of murder.
Eckbert runs away and comes to the place described by Berthe as where she met the old woman. He sees another man who reminds him of Walther. The bird flies over head and he approaches the old woman's house. She asks if Eckbert is bringing back her bird and her gems.
When Eckbert in turn asks the old woman why she is asking this, she replies "I was Walther, I was Hugo." She tells him that Berthe was his half-sister raised by the shepherd, because his parents would not keep her. Her time of trials was almost over when she stole the bird and gems. Eckbert goes insane and dies.
Batchelor, Jennifer & Weirm Judith "Judith Weir in Conversation" in Bachelor (1994). Seven page interview in unnumbered booklet.
Castein, Hanne "Ludwig Tieck – King of the Romantics" in Weir (2004) pp. 29–32.
Chester Novello (undated) Events Search on performances at publisher's website. Accessed 16 January 2010.
Clark, Andrew "Blond Eckbert, Linbury Studio, London", The Financial Times June 21, 2006. Review of The Opera Group's production.
Haywood, Tony (2005) "Judith WEIR (b.1954): Blond Eckbert (1993-4) Music Web International. Accessed 25 January 2010.
Holland, Bernard "MUSIC REVIEW; A Judith Weir Opera In Which Truth Is Harmful to Health", New York Times, August 16, 1994. Review of production by Santa Fe Opera.
Opera Group, The (2006) "Blond Eckbert & Other Stories" Web page of production by The Opera Group. Accessed 16 January 2010
Service, Tom "Blond Eckbert", The Guardian
, Friday 16 June 2006. Review of the Opera Group Production.
Tommasini, Anthony "CRITIC'S CHOICE/Classical CD's;Two Loners Not Above Pilfering", New York Times, February 8, 1996. Review of the CD of the original production.
Weir, Judith (1994) Blond Eckbert libretto, London, Chester Music Limited. The libretto itself appears on pages 5-15 of booklet.
Weir, Judith (2006) Blond Eckbert after Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert: Pocket Version, London, Chester Music Limited. (CH71016, rev. 1.07). Full score of the pocket version.
Wright, David C.H. "Weir, Judith", Grove Music Online, Version as updated 2 July 2009.
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
by Scottish composer Judith Weir
Judith Weir
Judith Weir CBE, is a British composer.-Biography:Her music has been appreciated by audiences and critics alike. She trained with John Tavener while still at school and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976...
. The composer wrote the English-language libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
herself, basing it on the cryptic supernatural short story Der blonde Eckbert by the German Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
writer Ludwig Tieck
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, writer of Novellen, and critic, who was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.-Early life:...
. Weir completed the original two act version of the opera in 1993, making Blond Eckbert her third full-length work in the genre. Like its predecessors, it was received well by the critics. She later produced a one act "pocket" version of the work. This uses chamber
Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...
forces rather than the full orchestra of the two act version and omits the chorus. The pocket version receives frequent performances, especially in Germany and Austria, while the full version is available in a recording featuring the original cast.
Performance and recording history
English National Opera
English National Opera is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St. Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden...
at the London Coliseum. This full-length version was expected by the composer to last approximately one hour and twenty minutes, but a recording of the performances takes approximately 65 minutes.
Blond Eckbert was given its American debut by the Santa Fe Opera
Santa Fe Opera
The Santa Fe Opera is an American opera company, located north of Santa Fe in the U.S. state of New Mexico, headquartered on a former guest ranch of .-General history:...
in August 1994.
In 2003, the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra
North German Radio Symphony Orchestra
The North German Radio Symphony Orchestra is a German orchestra, the symphony orchestra of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg....
gave a concert performance of the opera with slide projections.
A more lightly scored one-act "pocket" version of the opera, lasting less than an hour, was premiered on the 14th June 2006 at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
by The Opera Group and subsequently toured. Further performances of the pocket version by various German and Austrian groups have taken place in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
A live recording of the original cast of the two-act version of Blond Eckbert has been released on CD. A film featuring the same cast, adapted by Margaret Williams from Tim Hopkins's ENO production, was broadcast by Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
and later shown at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is held in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. It has a repertoire of cutting-edge jazz, orchestral, choral and electroacoustic performances, along with film, dance and music theatre...
.
Roles
| Role | Voice type | Full version Premiere, 20 April 1994 (Sian Edwards Sian Edwards Sian Edwards is an English conductor, best known as music director of English National Opera in the 1990s.Edwards was born in West Chiltington, West Sussex. She studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and later with the conductors Sir Charles Groves, Ilya Musin and Neeme Järvi... ) |
Pocket Version Premiere, 14 June 2006 (Patrick Bailey} |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blond Eckbert | baritone Baritone Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or... |
Nicholas Folwell | Owen Gilhooly |
| Berthe, his wife | mezzo-soprano Mezzo-soprano A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above... |
Anne-Marie Owens | Heather Shipp |
| Walther, his friend Hugo, his friend An old woman |
tenor Tenor The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2... |
Christopher Ventris Christopher Ventris Christopher Ventris is a British tenor. He is particularly known for his role as Parsifal which he performed at the Bayreuth Festival in 2008.... |
Mark Wilde |
| A bird | soprano Soprano A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody... |
Nerys Jones | Claire Wild |
| A dog | non-singing part | Thor | |
| Chorus | SATB SATB In music, SATB is an initialism for soprano, alto, tenor, bass, defining the voices required by a chorus or choir to perform a particular musical work... |
English National Opera English National Opera English National Opera is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St. Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden... Chorus |
None |
Libretto
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, writer of Novellen, and critic, who was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.-Early life:...
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
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
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
Bernard Holland
Bernard Holland is an internationally recognized American music critic. He served on the staff of The New York Times from 1981 until 2008 and held the post of chief music critic from 1995, contributing 4,575 articles to the newspaper....
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.
Music
The two-act version of Blond Eckbert is scored for double woodwind, (second players doublingDoubling
Doubling may refer to:*in math:**multiplication by 2**doubling the cube, a geometric problem**doubling time, the period of time required for a quantity to double in size or value**doubling map**period-doubling bifurcation***in music:...
piccolo
Piccolo
The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...
, cor anglais
Cor anglais
The cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....
, bass clarinet
Bass clarinet
The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B , but it plays notes an octave below the soprano B clarinet...
and contrabassoon
Contrabassoon
The contrabassoon, also known as the double bassoon or double-bassoon, is a larger version of the bassoon, sounding an octave lower...
,) four horns
Horn (instrument)
The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....
, three trumpet
Trumpet
The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...
s, three trombone
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...
s, timpani
Timpani
Timpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...
and one other percussion player, harp
Harp
The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...
and strings
String section
The string section is the largest body of the standard orchestra and consists of bowed string instruments of the violin family.It normally comprises five sections: the first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos, and the double basses...
. The percussion consists of glockenspiel
Glockenspiel
A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...
, suspended cymbal
Suspended cymbal
right|thumb|Classical suspended cymbalA suspended cymbal is any single cymbal played with a stick or beater rather than struck against another cymbal. A common abbreviation used is sus. cym., or sus. cymb. .-History:...
, xylophone
Xylophone
The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets...
, tenor drum
Tenor drum
A tenor drum is a cylindrical drum that is higher pitched than a bass drum.In a symphony orchestra's percussion section, a tenor drum is a low-pitched drum, similar in size to a field snare, but without snares and played with soft mallets or hard sticks. Under various names, the drum has been used...
, bell
Bell (instrument)
A bell is a simple sound-making device. The bell is a percussion instrument and an idiophone. Its form is usually a hollow, cup-shaped object, which resonates upon being struck...
or small gong
Gong
A gong is an East and South East Asian musical percussion instrument that takes the form of a flat metal disc which is hit with a mallet....
and three differently pitched cowbells. The pocket version is written for oboe, 2 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 2 horns, harp, 2 violins, and 2 cellos with no chorus.
Tommasini recognises Weir's musical voice as individual but he considers her to be more interested in consolidating the musical past than innovation or contemporary schools of music. Her music is, in Holland's words, "neither terribly old nor terribly new". While its language is modernist, it does not go far into the realms of dissonance. Tommasini lists Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
, Messaien, big band jazz and German romanticism as among the influences on her. When interviewed for the programme notes to the first production, Weir placed herself musically more in a Stravinskian tradition than one based on Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
.
Much of the vocal writing consists of short phrases of speech song, written more to support the text than to be musically interesting in itself. It is accompanied by chordal progressions or brief bursts of melody in the orchestra.
When Tom Service reviewed the chamber version of the opera for the Guardian, he felt that the virtues of Weir's compact musical style and her ability to tell a story with the smallest of musical gestures are even more evident in the later version than in the original.
While Tommasini welcomed the recording of Blond Eckbert and Service is enthusiatic about both its versions, other critics are more ambivalent. Holland finds the work episodic and lacking in development. He recognises Weir's ear for orchestration and graceful writing but feels she could have done more with it. Andrew Clark of the Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
also feels that more might have been made of the work by providing orchestral interludes or extended vocal numbers. However, he also identifies compactness as one of the works virtues.
Writing in Grove, David C. H. Wright sees a deliberate strategy in the understatement of much of the music: the conclusion of the opera, with the orchestra providing the composer's commentary on events, is all the more powerful because of the contrast with the first act.
Synopsis
Act 1. The bird describes how Eckbert peacefully lives alone with his wife. They have few visitors apart from Walther. The scene becomes clear revealing Eckbert and Berthe. Eckbert sees a light in the distance which he correctly takes to be Walther who has been out collecting natural history specimens. Eckbert thinks about how it is good to be able to tell friends secrets. When Walther arrives, Eckbert decides to get Berthe to tell Walther the story of her youth.Berthe describes how she grew up in a poor shepherd's home and how she ran away because she was a burden on her parents who were often angry. She met an old woman in black who led her to her house where were a dog, whose name Berthe has forgotten, and a bird that lays gems for eggs. Eventually Berthe ran away with the gems and the bird which she let free when it began to sing. She returned to her home village to find her parents dead. She bought a home and married Eckbert.
Walther thanks Berthe for telling the tale and says how he can really imagine the bird and the little dog, Strohmian. Both Eckbert and Berthe are amazed at Walther's naming the dog correctly and are terrified at his motives. When Walther goes out the next day, Eckbert follows him with a crossbow.
Act 2. The prelude describes Eckbert's killing of Walther. Eckbert then reads a letter which Berthe wrote as she was dying from the stress of thinking about how Walther knew the dog's name.
In a town, Eckbert meets Hugo, a man who looks like Walther. Hugo comforts Eckbert but then the crowd start accusing Eckbert of murder.
Eckbert runs away and comes to the place described by Berthe as where she met the old woman. He sees another man who reminds him of Walther. The bird flies over head and he approaches the old woman's house. She asks if Eckbert is bringing back her bird and her gems.
When Eckbert in turn asks the old woman why she is asking this, she replies "I was Walther, I was Hugo." She tells him that Berthe was his half-sister raised by the shepherd, because his parents would not keep her. Her time of trials was almost over when she stole the bird and gems. Eckbert goes insane and dies.
Sources
Batchelor, Jennifer (1994) Blond Eckbert: Judith Weir, London, English National Opera (1994). Proogramme book for the original production. (No page numbering.)Batchelor, Jennifer & Weirm Judith "Judith Weir in Conversation" in Bachelor (1994). Seven page interview in unnumbered booklet.
Castein, Hanne "Ludwig Tieck – King of the Romantics" in Weir (2004) pp. 29–32.
Chester Novello (undated) Events Search on performances at publisher's website. Accessed 16 January 2010.
Clark, Andrew "Blond Eckbert, Linbury Studio, London", The Financial Times June 21, 2006. Review of The Opera Group's production.
Haywood, Tony (2005) "Judith WEIR (b.1954): Blond Eckbert (1993-4) Music Web International. Accessed 25 January 2010.
Holland, Bernard "MUSIC REVIEW; A Judith Weir Opera In Which Truth Is Harmful to Health", New York Times, August 16, 1994. Review of production by Santa Fe Opera.
Opera Group, The (2006) "Blond Eckbert & Other Stories" Web page of production by The Opera Group. Accessed 16 January 2010
Service, Tom "Blond Eckbert", The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Friday 16 June 2006. Review of the Opera Group Production.
Tommasini, Anthony "CRITIC'S CHOICE/Classical CD's;Two Loners Not Above Pilfering", New York Times, February 8, 1996. Review of the CD of the original production.
Weir, Judith (1994) Blond Eckbert libretto, London, Chester Music Limited. The libretto itself appears on pages 5-15 of booklet.
Weir, Judith (2006) Blond Eckbert after Ludwig Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert: Pocket Version, London, Chester Music Limited. (CH71016, rev. 1.07). Full score of the pocket version.
Wright, David C.H. "Weir, Judith", Grove Music Online, Version as updated 2 July 2009.