Die verlorenen Spuren

A North American musicologist is commissioned to track down instruments in the Venezuelan jungle for the collection of the university's organographic institute. The journey, which is supposed to free him for weeks from unsatisfying activity and marriage, becomes for him, the "modern Sisyphus," the liberation par excellence. From the present of the North American metropolis, he travels to smaller and smaller cities and settlements in South America, back through the epochs of the past to the prehistoric early times of mankind, as they are alive in a hidden city in the jungle.The "miraculous reality" takes hold of him on this reversed educational journey from civilization to nature. He lives without the dictates of time in rhythm with his needs. Far from the old world, its powerless ideas, at the magic sources of myths and music, he is able to create music again himself. But he made the break with civilization only half-heartedly and pays a high price for it.Alejo Carpentier was born in Havana in 1904. After participating in an uprising against the dictator Machado, he fled to Paris in the 1920s, where he came into contact with the Surrealists. In 1939 he returned to Havana and taught music history. From 1966 he was again in Paris as cultural attaché of the Cuban embassy, where he died in 1980.