“Now Where?”
Heine Songs - Gernot Blume & Julie Spencer
The project "Now Where? - Heine Songs" was created at the occasion of the great German poet's 150th death anniversary in 2006.
The two musicians and composers Gernot Blume & Julie Spencer wrote 17 new settings to poems by Heinrich Heine.
This selection demonstrates the scope of Heine's poetry, from love lyrics to critical analysis of his times, from romanticism to political ideology, from his love of life to suffering death, from sensitivity to bitter irony.
Through their music Spencer & Blume convey the overwhelming expressivity and timelessness of Heinrich Heine's thoughts, and connect their own musicality with the power of the literary word.
With this literary project Blume and Spencer investigate the color palette of the voice in the style of ballads, jazz, art songs, folk, cabaret and theatre, in order to give new expression to the sharp intellect, the social and political commentary, and the extroverted personal style of Heinrich Heine's autobiographically rooted texts. Heine's words still resonate today with astonishingly timeless meaning beyond the boundaries of state, culture, and genre, since Heine himself lived, as do the two composers of these songs, inbetween different worlds.
Program:
- Doktrin
- Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland
- Jetzt wohin?
- Auf diesem Felsen bauen wir
- Wo?
- Nachtgedanken
- Sie erlischt
- Sorge nie, dass ich verrate
- Die schlesischen Weber
- Ich hab im Traum geweinet
- Das Fräulein stand am Meere
- Sie liebten sich beide
- Der Brief
- Laß die heilgen Parabolen
- Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen, Caput I
- Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt
- Fragen
