Booklister August

A Hot Summer Night was filmed and recorded live on 6th August 1983, at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, CA, with an audience of 18,000 fans, during the second-leg of Donna Summer’s 1983 Hard For The Money tour, which supported the recently released She Works Hard For The Money album. Restored from the analogue video tapes, this is the concert’s debut album release and therefore the makes it a perfect sequel to 1978’s Live And More. The set-list includes MacArthur Park, Love Is In Control…, Bad Girls Medley, On The Radio and Last Dance, as well as performances with special guests Musical Youth, her sisters Dara and Mary Ellen on an extended showpiece version of Woman, as well as closing the show with her eldest daughter Mimi, performing State Of Independence.

At around autumn 1809, the management of Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Theatre commissions Beethoven to compose the incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont, which premiered in Mainz in 1789. The plot of this tragedy is very much in keeping with the patriotic trend: it is set in Brussels, which is threatened by Spanish troops, and focuses on resistance against oppression and foreign rule. The hero, Egmont, places too much trust in the common sense and discretion of those in power – and this is his tragic mistake. In good faith, he allows himself to be lured into a deadly trap by the sinister Duke Alba, to whom he even explains his ideals of freedom and just rule. His lover Klärchen fails to persuade the cowardly citizens of Brussels to take violent action to free him, and, in her desperation, she commits suicide. What remains is the vision of a future freedom and victory – one that appears to Egmont in the form of Klärchen as he awaits execution in his dungeon.