Mar de Sophia

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was born in Oporto, on November 6, 1916 and died in Lisbon, on July 2, 2004. Her writing, her poetry is based on the observation of the exterior and she finds poetic beauty on the 4 elements – earth, water, air and fire – as in the reencounter with her origins. Nature acts as the element that conferring harmony between men and the place where she finds her childhood memories. Sophia is, with no doubt, one of my childhood memories. I can never forget that it was with A Menina do Mar, when I was only 7/8 years old, that my pleasure for reading skyrocketed. That kept on with O Cavaleiro da Dinamarca, O Rapaz de Bronze, A Fada Oriana… My childhood’s imagination was built throughout the reading of these tales and, in my adolescence, poems were added exuding freedom, where the Sea is recurrent and crucial. Sea that symbolizes the infinite, childhood memories, our own secrets, truth, transparency and purity, beauty, the desire for discovery, for knowledge, and essentially the eternal movement, life and death. These are essential premises of my musical imagination as a composer and remain in this work of homage to one of the essential figures of the Portuguese culture. This Sea that bonds us all, in a round and multicultural world. What a privilege to have the premiere of a new work, in the month when Sophia would become 98, the 10th year celebration after her disappearance, in her hometown, in a House where culture is breathed and from where it is possible to observe the Sea .
Sophia’s Sea is my musical interpretation of the bottom of the sea, where “there are white dreads” (“há brancos pavores”), a “Unreachable Silent world/ The agitation of the waves” (“Mundo silencioso que não atinge/ A agitação das ondas”), because “On the sand time poems land/ Weightless as a handkerchief” (“Sobre a areia o tempo poisa/ Leve como um lenço”), “But as beautiful as everything is / There is a monster hanging from it.” (“Mas por mais bela que seja cada coisa/ Tem um monstro em si suspenso.”) – in Deep Sea (Fundo do Mar), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Poetic Work I.

Full Score – Parts on hire