O, a Lyrical Intermezzo

What might nineteenth-century Romanticism still have to say to us today? In O, a Lyrical Intermezzo, the acclaimed duo Jelmer de Moed and Rik Kuppen explore that question together with Antwerp-based poet and performer Maud Vanhauwaert. Here, music and literature do not simply alternate: they illuminate and intensify one another.

Schumann and Brahms provide the point of departure: music steeped in longing, memory and inward expression. Alban Berg brings that Romantic sensibility to a new pitch at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his works for clarinet and piano, lyricism becomes more concentrated, more intense, and more fragile: as if the Romantic soul were awakening in a modern world.

Mathilde Wantenaar and Willem Jeths carry this Romantic inheritance into the present. In Nocturne, Wantenaar creates a nocturnal sound world where poetry, dream and imagination converge. Jeths’ Lèthè, named after the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology, touches on memory, loss and longing. Together, these works form a programme in which nineteenth-century Romanticism is not merely quoted, but reimagined in the here and now.

Maud Vanhauwaert weaves the music together with Romantic poems by Gezelle, Heine, Keats and Lamartine, alongside her own texts, which bring the Romantic gaze into the present with playfulness and sparkling wit. As a poet and performer, she moves effortlessly between poetry, spoken word and theatre.