The composer Franz Schubert often chose poetic texts for his songs that focus on wandering and farewell, giving voice to experiences of alienation and loneliness from which a longing for a sense of belonging and shelter arises. But how do we hear these works in the 21st century, at a time when millions of people around the world are forced to leave their homes and flee into new uncertainties?
In "SILENT SONGS into the wild", singers, dancers and musicians explore Schubert’s works as a legacy for the here and now, in a staged concert filmed with two cameras. Do these songs belong solely to the early Romantic period, or do they reach beyond the era in which they were written, into other times and other cultural spaces? How and why does a Schubert song move us today? What happens when a singer sets out with it on a journey of discovery towards freedom? This is an individual freedom, yet one still bound up with each performer’s cultural origins and the way those origins have shaped their personality.
Photo credit: Dieter Hartwig
