Premiere of the work "Allí donde la Luz" by José María Vitier in tribute to the centenary of Haydeé Santamaría and Fina García Marruz at Casa de las Américas

April 26, 2023

Pianist José María Vitier will offer the concert "Allí donde la Luz" alongside a group of artists this Thursday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m., at Casa de las Américas.

The presentation, which will pay tribute to the centenaries of Haydeé Santamaría and Fina García-Marruz, will include in its program works by Vitier, Beatriz Corona and Rodrigo García, in addition to the world premiere of the work "Allí donde la luz" by Vitier himself, which is based on a poem by García-Marruz dedicated to Haydeé Santamaría.

Among the performers will be the Chamber Orchestra of Havana, conducted by Daiana García; the National Choir of Cuba, under the baton of Digna Guerra; flutist Niurka González Núñez; Rodrigo García on piano; Abel Acosta on double bass; and percussionists Janet Rodríguez, Alejandro Aguiar and Yaroldis Abreu.

I have several motivations for conducting this interview, emphasized journalist Esther Barroso, the main one being that very soon a musical work of yours will premiere that pays tribute to Haydeé Santamaría on the occasion of her centenary, which we commemorated on December 30, 2022. This could happen on April 28, the anniversary of Casa de las Américas, which is also the day your mother, Fina García Marruz, would have turned one hundred years old, in one of whose poems the musical tribute to the Moncada heroine is inspired. I know that your bond with Haydeé was not direct in your case, but rather through Fina, your father, Cintio Vitier, and your brother Sergio. How does the image of Haydeé reach you and how do you reflect it in this musical work you just composed?

Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about some topics that are not frequently discussed. As for the motivation to compose this work dedicated to Haydeé Santamaría, I must begin by saying, although you've already suggested it, that I did not have a direct personal bond with her. But from my early youth, Haydeé was a very intense presence in my family life, first of all, through my brother Sergio Vitier, because it is well known what Haydeé meant to Casa de las Américas and to the Experimental Sound group, of which my brother was a founder. But beyond that, I have the image and intensity of Haydeé because she marked my brother greatly and because it was a very frequent topic of conversation in my house, the things he told me about her, whom he saw very frequently, more than my parents did. That entire generation was marked by Haydeé, her imprint is present in all the musicians who gathered around Casa de las Américas. Haydeé was absolutely the benefactress of all that fantastic movement, not only national but also international.

I was greatly honored when I received the commission to create a work for Haydeé Santamaría's centenary. It must be commemorated as it should be, in grand style, with all the visibility it requires and that the figure of Haydeé has not always had.

From a musical point of view, how is the work conceived?

Although the poem is titled "In the Death of a Heroine of the Homeland," the musical piece is titled "Allí donde la luz." It is a phrase taken from a verse that ends by saying: …there where the light does not forget its warriors. The poem is very motivating and of different forms. It is a brief poem and the musical work extends it, something that can sometimes be done with music because it has a somewhat broader discourse. It moves through the verses, trying to enter the spirit of each one of them and has a contemporary language. It is written for mixed choir, string orchestra, piano and percussion. It has very intentional allusions, one of them being to Ophelia, the Shakespearean character.

…which is also in Fina's poem.

Yes: Cover her with flowers like Ophelia. Suddenly the music touches a somewhat Elizabethan atmosphere from the point of view of choral writing, as a form of counterpoint associated with that type of aesthetic. But those are moments, because the work is continuously throwing lines toward that legendary sense that both the poem and the figure of Haydeé possess, toward the present and especially toward the future. It is a work that also has a contemporary language.

And perhaps it has that Latin American sonority that is frequently identified with the figure of Haydeé and also with the musical work done by you?

Not deliberately. When I musicalize verses, the dictation I follow is that of sonority, of the word. Much of my music is inspired by words, by verses, although it has no lyrics, but they had their origin in poetic experiences and in this case, doubly so. And it is a work that contains dramatic elements…

As dramatic was Haydeé's life…

Because suddenly I realized that I was not just creating a musical work dedicated to Haydeé, just as my mother did not only write a poem dedicated to Haydeé. Fundamentally, everything has an air of Prayer, which is more encompassing. Of course, Prayer to Haydeé, to her life and her death, but it is also a Prayer for all of us, for Cuba, for its destiny. Although it doesn't say so, the intention of the music is to throw a line toward the present and the future. And, after passing through anguished moments, sonorously, it ends as if foreseeing clarity, like a dawn, like the end of a journey that turns out to be happy.

That is, it bets on the light that we all need so much…

Exactly, it bets on the light. That is the idea of the work. Things must be thought through to the maximum and then see what is achieved.

Have you ever feared commissions?

No, on the contrary, gratitude is what I have felt.

In your work there are several examples, one of them that great soundtrack for the television series "En silencio ha tenido que ser," but how has that relationship with commissioned work been? What challenges are presented to you? Where do you place your imagination?

People have asked me that other times and I think I know the answer. I see it this way: you are always working, creating new works even if no one has asked you for anything and even if you don't sit down to do it, there is a continuous flow of ideas. At that moment someone gives you a commission. And people, when they ask you for music, do so because they already knew something of your work or because something you did they liked, they would like to have the same thing. That is usually the motivation.

But what's curious is that when I accept, it's not for the same reason. I accept because it is the opportunity I have to do something completely unexpected, that has nothing to do with what I did before, nor with what the person who commissioned it expects. That is what makes me feel gratitude, because it gives me the possibility to advance, to grow as a composer.

And you have to try not to rely completely on your preestablished ideas. You have to see if what you were thinking works for that commission and it gives you the opportunity to deploy a language or a way of creating that you hadn't used before.

The work dedicated to Haydeé Santamaría, after I finished it, I realized it has the same format as the Cuban Mass. I didn't set out to do it that way. The verse was asking me for the instrumentation and was dictating its laws. Always in the work you have to comply with the laws of composition or instrumentation, you have to be in interaction with a certain norm, but there are other laws that arise in the process that you have to go on obeying or breaking, and all of that is fascinating.

In some of those commissioned works you and your brother Sergio Vitier collaborated. How did that work relationship develop, that dialogue not only between brothers but between musicians? How did brotherhood and being colleagues function?

Brotherhood is a continuous process that never stopped, nor will it ever stop, because it is a dialogue of blood and it is deeper and more important than the profession.

Then, we have a figure like Sergio, with a very great artistic sufficiency and solidity that precedes me in age as well, who plays an instrument that is autonomous, that is self-sufficient, like the guitar, the same as the piano, which are leading instruments. Notice that piano and guitar duos are not frequent.

Before the television series we had made a song together, one half by me and the other by him. I just remembered that. Neither of us made songs; we made instrumental music. But they gave us that commission and it was recorded. It was a sonnet by Eliseo Diego dedicated to Alicia Alonso.

Because moreover, when you say that two musicians collaborate, it doesn't mean both work on the same thing, but rather that each one does a part because the act of composing music is absolutely solitary. You write with your pencil and he with his, and I'm speaking literally about pencil, because back then there was no other way to do it. You write on your staff paper and he on his. These are musics that are connected in their continuity, but in their creative moment they belong to him or to me. That's the case with the music of "En silencio…" where I did part of the themes and Sergio another. That's how we've worked on several television series and also for dance.

In your Facebook profile I read a very interesting experience of yours. You came across on the street what you call a true Artist, with a capital A. She was an admirer who confessed to you that she should have studied music, but for various reasons couldn't, and then she said to you: what I do have is always singing inside. During the pandemic, many artists looked back and reflected on that great theme of the creator-audience bond. I imagine that José María is also always singing and composing inside, but how often do you need to confront the audience, the critics? Because while composing is a solitary act, performance is the opposite.

The distinctive characteristic of this profession of composing is that it begins in a solitary, individual and non-transferable experience, but it does not culminate until it is extended to others, until it is disseminated, and not only that, it doesn't end even when it is performed. Each time it is performed, the process continues, because no one sings the same song twice in the same way. Music is always varying. It's not the same—and I say this with all respect for all colleagues from all artistic manifestations—when you publish a book, it's finished, you wish you could change it and you can't anymore. A painting you can retouch, a film when you premiere it is already finished, a cycle closes. But performance, and especially that of my own music, which I have the luxury of varying at my will, is never the same, not even when it's published, printed. Execution is always different. Music, furthermore, is not written with the same precision as words, so there are many margins for interpretation.

And when we hadn't yet fully emerged from that calamity that was the pandemic, in one of the opening stages, you offered a concert at Teatro Martí to premiere the album "Bienaventuranzas." What does the impact of a live performance provoke in you?

It is gratifying and at the same time tense. I am among those who will never come off stage calm before the public. One comes out with undoubted pressure, no matter how many times you've done it and even if you know it by heart. It is a vibrant activity, but very exhausting and emotionally demanding.

We have mentioned here your parents, your brother, your uncle Eliseo Diego. You come from a family privileged in the sense of thought and ethical values. Being born and growing up in that family environment, in which moreover a cross-cutting and intergenerational dialogue occurred, what life lessons did it provide you to face certain challenges imposed by life and the artist's relationship with society? How do you make use of those tools that your family and that environment of critical analysis of society bequeathed to you?

That is a very broad question and a topic I have thought about a lot. What you say is true, that I had the privilege of being born in a spiritually very healthy environment. My family is like all others, with its lights and shadows, and its problems. But what I can tell you, perhaps abbreviating, what happens to me very often and increasingly, given the circumstances of life to which you have already alluded and of the country, of our concrete difficulties and our daily questions, I increasingly turn to the thought of what my father and mother would have done, how they would have reacted. Because, although they didn't make family life a lectern or deliberate pedagogy, as they lived with tremendous simplicity, their own conduct and the memory of how they acted at each moment is something that sheds much light for me on the necessity of ethical principles, of critical spirit, of the preservation of creative freedom as a treasure that cannot be wasted.

Responsibility to society in the abstract, but also to one's fellow human beings; the profound relationship we have with history—not only inherited history but the history we are living now—; fidelity to certain values and confidence that artistic creation, insofar as it unleashes emotions and belongs to a territory where human beings relate in a deeper way, even from a community of ideas, opens many hearts. All that vision of art and what it falls to artists to do, without proposing it deliberately, constitute the great lesson my parents left me.

During the pandemic period, some of us discovered José María Vitier as a poet of the word, because we already know he is a poet of music. Is this new or does it have antecedents and some of us didn't know it? Might there be some book of poems project in the works? You have already shared them on social media and they are beautiful.

I was comfortable with the idea that people thought I was a poet as a musician.

To what extent are you afraid of being compared to two great poets like Fina and Cintio?

That's where the problem begins. I have always felt closer to poetry than to any other artistic manifestation, since I was only a pianist, a director of a group or a composer. I wrote some verses in my youth, some songs with my own verses early on, but I didn't write nor did I have a track record to consider myself a writer. I have always been a reader of poetry, and I'm very good at that. I have no problem with vanity there. I learned that as a child and I discovered poetry before music and in the voices of the poets who met at my house and read their poems.

At a moment in my life I felt the need to write poetry in a somewhat compulsive way. My parents did not live through that process. Although some small things that became public my mother liked very much, song lyrics, but not poems.

Perhaps, like my wife experienced with painting, where at a certain moment she felt that mystery, that calling, and suddenly felt the need and was able to do it, the same thing happened to me. And indeed, I publish a lot on my Facebook profile. I enjoy and I get the most out of what I said at the beginning, that just as music always changes, the same thing happens to me with verses: each time I post a sonnet or a story, it's never the same, I change parts of it. And I'm afraid to fix it definitively, because for me it is always still an evolving work. I would have to feel satisfied with every word to publish a book and I don't see that very soon. What I do guarantee you is that I will continue doing it.

New projects?

There is a film in this first part of the year with a Mexican producer. There are many concerts, the situation of my mother's centenary is driving a welcome demand for concerts inside and outside Cuba. There are international commitments that were not made before and I am picking them up now.

In the Death of a Heroine of the Homeland

Give the suicide victim a leaf on her temple,
A sempervivum in the hollow of her neck.
Cover her with flowers, like Ophelia.
Those who loved her have remained orphaned.
Cover her with the tenderness of tears.
Turn into dew that refreshes their grief.
And if the pity of flowers is not enough
Tell her in her ear that it has all been a dream.
Render her honors like a brave one
Who lost only her final battle.
Let her not remain in her inconsolable hour.
May her deeds not go to the oblivion of grass.
May they be gathered, one by one,
There where the light does not forget its warriors.

Fina García Marruz—August, 1980