Blood and Water

A preview performance at 4pm on November 15th of Blood and Water: a series of poems by British poet-artist Sophie Herxheimer, transformed into a dynamic new song cycle by Canadian composer James Rolfe. This concert presents highlights from the new work, featuring Canadian soprano Sara Schabas and British-based Australian pianist Lara Dodds-Eden, with readings by the poet.

This project began in 2019 with conversations about shared family and history, the creators being first cousins. They met in Germany to explore the places where their mutual relatives had emerged and learned and led their lives, and later, fled. Poems came unbidden during this visit; voices revealed themselves in cobbled passages between old walls, in art galleries, floating above the Rhine, as the artist cousins observed, made notes, discussed and absorbed the often-disturbing history that had lain noisily unmentioned around their own postwar journeys into adulthood.

There were subsequent meetings online and in person in London and Krakow, with poems and songssent back and forth. The creators discovered a mutual fascination with several characters—some known, others unknown and imagined—who were summoned into songs. Other songs arose from poems invoking a sense of place, or a wider family, with their daily rounds, aspirations, fears and regrets, their lives and deaths and afterlives. Shorter songs grew from collage poems that pose questions and answer obliquely: the voice of the present, punctuating and grounding the drifting, unanswerable past.

This is a highly personal project for Herxheimer and Rolfe, woven through their familial, emotional, and artistic kinship. The language of the poems and the music seeks to honour these ordinary people and restore them to memory after their unjust exiles or deaths. It grieves war and persecution, which stubbornly remain with us today. It is about redeeming ghosts and turning them into ancestors.