La Piccola Cubana

In 1969 the writer Miguel Barnet published his novel »Rachel’s Song«, a fictional »eye-witness account« of shifting social conditions in Cuba. Tivoli and circus stages form the settings for Rachel’s narratives, combining memory and illusion. For the composer Hans Werner Henze, who travelled around Cuba, the country was a place of magical appeal that inspired him politically and artistically. In the early 1970s together with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, he conceived the opera »La Cubana oder ein Leben für die Kunst« (»La Cubana or a Life for Art«). A libretto revision with the title »La piccola Cubana« and the concertante »Lieder und Tänze aus der Operette La Cubana« (»Songs and Dances from the Operetta La Cubana«) were produced as counterparts to the large-scale production of »La Cubana«. These are the textual and instrumental basis for the arrangement that Henze could not finish before his death in 2012.