V4

Saturday, 25 February 2012

2.30 pm, Concert in the Kurt Weill Centre/Haus Feininger

„Sous les cieux français“
Songs between Whence and Whereto

Vocalist: Anna Haentjens
Piano: Sven Selle


From April to November 1933 over 400 German artists were able to flee the Nazis by becoming official residents in Paris. In the French capital, where other exiles from around the world had already found refuge, these poets, musicians and theatrical artists „outlawed“ in Germany encountered one another again in the place they called „an extension of Berlin's Kudamm“. Now these émigrés composed and wrote in order to survive both artistically and materially. They practiced conformity or exercised resistance, they were merely passing through or chose to settle down. Kurt Weill is one of these who arrives in Paris on 23rd March with only a few meagre belongings, and immediately buries himself in work. He experiences the ups and downs of an invigorating, dynamic new life and the disaster of losing his hard-won existence in Germany. Anna Haentjens, known to festival-goers as a sensitive and mesmerising chanson singer, explores the questions „whence?“ and „whereto?“ which the exiles had to answer during their time in France.