Telling stories by music means was a challenge that was taken up at the beginning of nineteenth century, anxious to demonstrate that music can be a universal language, capable of conveying a message without the need for words or images. In the wake of Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems, the young organist Juliette Dillon (1823-1854) set about “translating for the piano” E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fantastic Tales. Thirty years before Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, she brought all her talents as an improviser into play to relate ten of the German poet’s best-known tales. We can only regret the early death of this talented musician, and wonder why her name has disappeared from the music dictionaries.
