Between the lines - Music history's hidden emotions on the big stage
Royal Danish Library and LGBT+ Denmark celebrate free love with a concert dedicated to the hidden emotions of music history.
Programme
Franz Schubert (1797-1828): Im Frühling (text: Ernst Schulze) (1826)
Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): Possession (text: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth) (1913)
Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952): Ariëtta (1917)
Pauline Hall (1890-1969): Veslemøy (text: Arne Garborg from Haugtussa) (1912)
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Violin Sonata (1942-1943)
Intermission
John Cage (1912-1992): Dream (1948)
Franz Schubert: Ganymede (text: JW von Goethe) (1817)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Die Georgine (text: Hermann von Gilm) (1885)
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907): Love (text: Arne Garborg from Haugtussa) (1895)
Samuel Barber (1919-1981): I Hear an Army (text: James Joyce) (1939)
Richard Strauss: Cäcilie (text. Heinrich Hart) (1894)
Mark Simpson (1988-): An Essay of Love (2020)
William Bolcom (1938-): George (text: Arnold Weinstein) (1978)
Welcome to a different concert about the hidden stories in our shared history.
The hidden love
Music history is full of men and women who love each other! But if you look closely, music has also been a means of expressing love between man and man or woman and woman. Often more discreet and implicit, as other types of love and sex have been in conflict with society's norms.
On this night, we celebrate love, both between the lines and on the lines, and we celebrate the music that has been a means of expressing it. The evening's programme celebrates diversity, and focuses on composers and lyricists who in one way or another have lived outside or in conflict with society's norms when it comes to gender and love.
A versatile music programme
"I would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us." This is what the composer John Cage wrote in 1944 in a love letter to the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was to become his great love and partner until Cage's death in 1992.
The music ranges from John Cage, Dame Ethel Smyth, Franz Schubert and the Norwegian composer Pauline Hall, who, together with her partner Caro Olden, was one of the first in Norway to live openly in a homosexual relationship. The programme consists of both instrumental works, shows and cabaret performed by pianist Kristoffer Hyldig, violinist Bogdan Božović and singers Brit-Tone Müllertz and Martin Hatlo.
The works are both about love, longing, desire, about being alone or outside - and about sticking together as an army.
Letters, poems, and diary entries put the music programme into perspective
The concert also gives a glimpse into the lives and views of the composers. There are letters, poems and diary notes which tell about their times, feelings and thoughts. Actor Sandra Yi Sencindiver reads out selected pieces of text which relate to the music, the composers and their time. The lyrics tell of lives that have been lived, both good and bad. Jesper Egelund, who is programme manager for music at Royal Danish Library, will frame the works and the composers in their musical historical context.
Participants
Brit-Tone Müllertz, soprano
Martin Hatlo, bass baritone
Bogdan Božović, violin
Kristoffer Hyldig, piano
Sandra Yi Sencindiver, reading
In collaboration with
The concert was created in collaboration with the pianist Kristoffer Hyldig and LGBT+ Denmark, who this year celebrate their 75th anniversary of the fight to be able to live openly as a minority within gender and love to seriously get on the public agenda with the founding of the Confederation of 1948, which today is called LGBT+ Denmark.
