This composition was created on the occasion of a piano song festival on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Heinrich Heine’s death. Translating his verses into song seemed inconceivable to me, but while reading one of his Lazarus poems, the idea of ​​making precisely that unimaginability the subject emerged. This poem also revolves around the question of what cannot be integrated. It produces individual, pointed linguistic images, but in a time flow of changing perspectives they dissolve each other again. I made comparable approaches and distances to Heine’s words in my setting. In a spectrum between words sung in a language that is understandable, broken down into individual letters or translated into piano textures without singing, I have discussed different degrees of distance and closeness to the text. The result is a piano song with and without words.

(Isabel Mundry)