Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine is best known in France for his "Book of Songs", published in 1827, from which hundreds of composers have taken their most beautiful melodies. However, Heine was not only a poet. He was also a columnist, press correspondent, essayist, librettist, playwright, art critic and polemicist. He relentlessly castigated the political and social state of Germany (the German Confederation), in which the arbitrary power of princes and kings was the law and serfdom was only abolished in 1848.
Censored by the Church and placed on the Index even before he was banned from entering the country and issued with an arrest warrant, he found himself in exile in Paris "in the home of champagne and the Marseillaise" from 1831. From his childhood and youth, which he spent at the French grammar school in Düsseldorf, which was occupied by the French at the time, he was surrounded by the spirit of the Enlightenment. "I am a German nightingale in the wig of Monsieur de Voltaire". Humor and irony, which are already evident in his first volumes of poetry, are for him, who loves beauty, his weapon to defend himself against the filth of the world, the sufferings and humiliations of life. He mocked his own sensibility, but mockery and sarcasm also served him to destroy his opponents. The failure of his various attempts to integrate professionally (he holds a doctorate in law) in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, linked to his Jewishness and his political commitment, destroyed all restraint and radicalized his political and religious discourse.

From Paris, he regularly wrote books and articles to bring Germany closer to the French and France closer to the Germans. He saw himself as a mediator between the two peoples and wrote in his will: "The great cause of my life was to work towards cordial understanding between Germany and France. Another great cause? Yes! The French Revolution ... and ... even beautiful women!

Carolin Neukamm, mezzo-soprano
Yves Descharmes, piano

Beate and Philippe Payen de la Garanderie, Liliane Tuetey-Descharmes, reading
Dramaturgy :
Liliane Tuetey-Descharmes and Yves Descharmes