Über Gipfel (Over Mountaintops)

Trained in

OpenStreetMap / Open Database License (ODbL)

București

eng. Bucharest, deu. Bukarest

Bucharest is the capital of Romania and today has over 1.8 million inhabitants. In 1659 Bucharest replaced Târgoviște as the capital of the Principality of Wallachia. After the unification of the Danubian principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) under Ion Cuza in 1861, Bucharest became the capital of Romania in 1862. Within a short time, it had become by far the largest city in the Southeast European region between Budapest and Istanbul. Under King Carol I. (1866-1914) Bucharest underwent urban planning changes following Western trends, with palaces, boulevards, parks, Art Nouveau villas and electric lighting. Towards the end of the 19th century, the city also developed into an industrial and financial center. In 1916, during World War I, it was occupied by the Central Powers, with whom a peace treaty was signed in 1918. Between 1936 and 1940, a Parisian-style boulevard was built in Bucharest, which also earned the city the nicknames "Micul Paris" ("Little Paris") or "Paris of the East." In World War II, after a brief period of neutrality, Romania sided with the Germans after General Ion Antonescu and the fascist "Iron Guard" turned Romania into a "national-legionary state." When Antonescu was arrested by King Mihai 1944, this resulted in air raids by the Germans, which destroyed large parts of Bucharest. In 1977, an earthquake caused widespread damage. Beginning in 1984, communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had parts of the historic old city demolished in order to build a large socialist center, but this was never completed after his execution and the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Bucharest is now the seventh largest city in the EU, of which Romania has been a member since 2007.

București in the Online Encyclopedia of the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (German)

București at Google Maps

, Darmstadt and Paris, the internationally acclaimed Romanian composer Carmen Petra Basacopol (*1926) published Peste vârfuri in 1967, a work in which he set a poem by Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889) to music. The song is performed here in the German version Über Gipfel (Over Mountaintops).

Eminescu is a leading figure of Romanian literature. He spent his early childhood in Botoșani in northern Moldavia and, from 1857, lived in Chernivtsi, the Bukovina capital then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he attended German-language schools. In 1866 his writing career began with the publication of the poem De-aș avea (If I had); in addition, from this time on, he worked for various touring theater groups and, from 1870, also as a journalist. From 1869 to 1872 Eminescu studied philosophy in Vienna, then history, economics and law in Berlin until 1874. Until 1877 he managed the central library and a newspaper in Iași, before moving to Bucharest, where he worked for the newspaper Timpul (The Times) until 1883. Eminescu died, stricken by illness, at the age of 39.

His great popularity and reputation as the national poet of Romania is due to the fact that his work set standards for the development of the modern “high Romanian” language and has, to this day, lost none of its poetic power. On the one hand, his writing is strongly imbued with German Romanticism and contains elements of social criticism. But it also betrays strong influences of a pessimism influenced by Schopenhauer, and even aspects of nihilism. Central themes of his poetry are therefore loneliness, existential skepticism, and self-denial. This tendency also comes to the fore in Basacopol’s setting of Über Gipfeln, which is committed to a late Romantic melodic style and in which the lonely lyrical “I” falls into hopelessness and a longing for death.

Mia Jakob was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where she completed her master's degree in music education at the Academy of Music in 2014. In 2017, she began a master's degree in voice at the Leopold Mozart Center in Augsburg, Germany, graduating in 2021. In addition to her pedagogical work and artistic activities as an opera singer, her focus is on combining film with opera and song.
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Denise Maurer is currently completing her Master's degree in "Klavier" (piano) at the Leopold Mozart Center in Augsburg. Together with the singer Mia Jakob, she has on several occasions provided the musical framework for events organized by the Bukovina Institute in Augsburg. Maurer graduated from the University of Music in Munich with a bachelor's degree in artistic-pedagogical piano and a master's degree in music journalism. In addition to her pedagogical and artistic activities, she is a freelance journalist for the Neue Musikzeitung as well as BR-Klassik.

English translation: William Connor

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Tragik (Tragedy) / Schlaflied (Lullaby)

Schön Schätzchen, ich wünsch dir ein‘ schöne gute Nacht (My dearest, I wish you good night) / Oh du mein grüner Haselstrauch (Oh you my green hazel bush)

Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Goes Around the World) / Die tote Stadt op. 12 – Glück, das mir verblieb (The dead city – Joy, that remained to me)

Six Celan Songs – 5. Nächtlich geschürzt