Heine Gets The Groove
A scenic concert – spoken, sung and played by Uwe Neumann and Ian Melrose
The texts of Heinrich Heine are almost two centuries old, and yet they seem so fresh, so modern, so astonishingly close to our contemporary attitude to life, (his language is of such poetic directness and such a folk-song-like lightness) that the idea was almost obvious: one would have to invent one’s own music, especially for the poems – from deep sadness to malicious mockery, every human emotion is represented – because each of these pieces has its own temperature, its very own composition of humor, anger, knowledge of the world and melancholy. And so a variety of musical forms emerged, from art songs to chanson and world music to blues and rap(!). In between, the important stages of Heinrich Heine’s life are told and acted out in small scenic sketches; most of the texts come from his sparkling prose – the nine years that the ailing bedridden Heine had to spend in Paris turned out to be an incredibly creative time. The actor/chansonnier Uwe Neumann, obsessed with languages and at home on many stages, and the internationally recognized guitar virtuoso Ian Melrose try in their quite experimental program to give Heine’s poetry the groove that is actually already inherently there.