Heine: First They Burn Books
In 1831, Heinrich Heine, perhaps the greatest of all the German Romantic poets, left Germany for Paris, where he lived the rest of his life as a political exile. His works had been banned in his native country as a result of his radical and publicly aired political beliefs. His conversion to Christianity, which was seen by many of his intimates as a betrayal of his Jewish heritage, further exacerbated his isolation. Heine’s works were later banned by the Nazis and his grave in Montmartre was destroyed.
With a script based on Heine’s writings, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Wagner’s infamous essay Jewishness in Music, this theatrical concert examines censorship in Heine’s time and beyond, into the Nazi period. Works of the “degenerate” composers banned by the Nazis, as well as some of Schubert and Schumann’s extraordinary settings of Heine’s poems, create a concert experience infused with political drama.
Heine: First They Burn Books was part of our 2008-2009 Season.
2008-2009 Season
Artists in Exile
Ensemble for the Romantic Century celebrated its eighth season by examining the lives of exiled artists. Exile can take many forms. It can be political or spiritual, or it can be caused by an isolating physical condition. Artists in exile sometimes withdraw into themselves, as was the case of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who said that “the condition we call exile accelerates tremendously one’s otherwise professional flight-or drift- into isolation, – into an absolute perspective: into the condition in which all one is left with is oneself and one’s own language, with nobody or nothing in between.” Yet some exiled artists become mediators between the culture or situation they have left behind and the new one in which they find themselves. They take from and contribute to their new worlds, transforming their experience as exiles into artistic expression and in some cases into political activism.
More from our 2008-2009 Season: