Meijering sets Saña’s poem to music

DARMSTADT – (job). The Darmstadt writer Heleno Saña is best known as a controversial observer of the present. Books such as “The Fourth Reich”, “The Lie Europe” or “The Lost Humanity” repeatedly triggered debates. After the fall of the Wall, the Barcelona-born author, who has lived in Darmstadt since 1959, attested that the Germans were “between tearfulness and megalomania” . Saña is valued for his argumentative sharpness and the wide range of knowledge with which he covers his socio-philosophical writings. But he also writes poetry, then in his native Spanish; a particularly beautiful example is “De pronto veo”, a poem in which the observation of a bird and the contemplation of human existence meet. Cord Meijering had set the poem to music in his “Darmstädter Liederbuch”.

Now the composer has turned back to a poem Sañas – a musical greeting for his 90th birthday, which the writer celebrated at the beginning of September. It was to become a cycle, a song has now been performed for the first time by the soprano Yeree Suh and the pianist Carmen Piazzini. It is a song that vibrates in nine-eighth time, uses all the notes of the natural tone series and, with the harmonic lead, signals a wistful mood of missing: a love poem that Saña once wrote for his late wife Gisela, in which the speech is made of a “woman made out of harmony”.