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German GDR spy's isolation poems turned into music on new album

German GDR spy's isolation poems turned into music on new album

Composer Nicolai Worsaae has written two ensemble works about isolation inspired by the East German Spy Jörg Meyer's nine months of solitary confinement in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen at the end of the 1970'ies. The works are now released on a new album and will be performed live at a concert tonight.

New release
24 September 2018

The album Wesenheit ab Wesenheit, recorded by FIGURA Ensemble and Signe Asmussen, puts focus solitary confinement and loneliness. Composer Nicolai Worsaae includes a.o. the sound of a radiator, as a direct reference to prisoner Jörg Meyer’s life in his cell, where in loneliness and the beginnings of insanity he starts to talk to precisely a radiator.

Solitary confinement in Vestre Fængsel

Meyer, a young, East German prisoner in Vestre Fængsel in Copenhagen, convicted for spying for the German Democratic Republic, wrote during a solitary confinement lasting nine months in 1979 a series of poems that were published under the title Isolationsdigte (Isolation Poems). The poems functioned as a kind of self-therapy for the violentmental strain he experienced in his cell – only person Meyer conversed with was the prison chaplain Jørgen Worsaae, the composer’s father. It is this story the chaplain’s son, Nicolai, had with him when, just over 30 years later, he started to compose the first work Wesenheit ab Wesenheit from 2011 for soprano, voice and chamber ensemble as well as the later sister work WaWV from 2014, in which Meyer’s own recitation is mixed with instruments, concrete electronic sounds, and a song voice.

The album 'Wesenheit ab Wesenheit' is the third album with FIGURA Ensemble released by Dacapos Records.
  • Nicolai Worsaae

    Wesenheit ab Wesenheit

  • Peter Bruun

    Miki Alone - Seven songs for a mad woman

  • John Frandsen, Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen, Peter Bruun, Karsten Fundal, Jens Hørsving, Ivar Frounberg

    ... to arrive where we started ...

Works written for FIGURA

Wesenheit ab Wesenheit and WaWV are both written for FIGURA Ensemble during Nicolai Worsaae's residency with the ensemble. Tonight they perform the works together with soprano Signe Asmussen at a concert in KoncertKirken, whereafter the new release will be celebrated with a reception and an artist talk with Nicolai Worsaae and clarinettist Anna Klett.