Description
The celebrations to mark the foundation of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria provided an opportunity to rediscover a personality who came to Gran Canaria in the 1930s and was to make a significant contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature and perspective of Canarian culture and the search for a cultural identity: Richard H. Stein. He did so with a fascinating work that he composed on the island, the Suite "Canarias" / Kanarische Suite [Canarian Suite] Op. 34. Here, an artist and intellectual from Central Europe demonstrates his understanding of the island and invents new sounds. He was forced to leave behind everything he was used to in Germany and to embark on completely new paths in order to engage with the island world, however unsuitable it might be for creative work and intellectual endeavour. In his piece, he reclaims the great potential of this island, so to speak, and shows a way in which its culture could pave a path back to itself that is as down to earth as it is forward-looking, namely in the unification of regional uniqueness and modernity.
Richard Heinrich Stein was born on 28 February 1882 in Halle/Saale (Germany). After travelling to the Canary Islands for the first time in 1914 as a result of the events of the First World War, he decided to move to Gran Canaria for good in 1932 having recognised the growing strength of National Socialism in his country. Although he led an active life on the island for ten years, travelling the entire archipelago, taking part in conferences and debates, writing the occasional polemical article on island tourism, composing plays, organising musical evenings at the Teatro Perez Galdos and in his house, and also receiving recognition from the local press (as the detailed report by the poet and chronicler Luis Doreste Silva in the newspaper Hoy shows), the trail goes dead. After his unexpected and mysterious death in his home on 11 August 1942, he was forgotten. It was not until decades later that the musicologistLothar Siemens Hernandez and his colleagues Isidoro Santana Gil and Sergio Alonso unearthed the legacy of Richard H. Stein and began to research his life and work - including the Canarian Suite, which can be considered his most important composition written on the island.
