Musical-Literary Evening

About the event

Pianist Sofja Gülbadamova, who has already appeared twice in solo recitals for the Chopin Society Darmstadt, and author Thomas Nickelsen enter into a musical-literary dialogue, in which piano works by Edvard Grieg, Ernst von Dohnányi, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Reynaldo Hahn and Fryderyk Chopin alternate with texts from the novel “The Trace of the Little Prince. Approaches to Childhood”.

West of the Mississippi, the German physician Julius Wortschmidt has recently been working successfully in the research department of an American medical-pharmaceutical corporation. He has perfectly mastered the business code, and his family life, too, runs along orderly lines. Then an unexpected encounter brings back images from long-past childhood and youth, a magic to which Wortschmidt cannot help but succumb. However, the real reunion with the past unfolds differently than expected, for the world has changed, and disappointments and dangers lurk along the way back — but so, too, does unexpected happiness…

The central theme of the book is the nature of memory and the strength that memories can give, especially in situations of personal upheaval and temporary uprooting. The narrative plays in manifold ways with motifs from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fairy-tale novel “The Little Prince”, letting its most important characters appear, sometimes openly, sometimes hidden, within the plot. Five readings of very different passages are introduced and concluded musically by piano miniatures that match their mood in content or atmosphere.