For Soprano and Piano accompaniment

Duration: approx. 14 min

The text from these songs is taken from a series of poems written by my great-grandfather, Mariano Melendro Serna (affectionately called Mamano), to his wife Ester. They would exchange letters and photographs with sonnets and love poems written on the back. Mariano was a very cultured man and multifaceted; a civil engineer who rose to be the governor of Tolima in Colombia. He surrounded himself with art, music, and literature. In his free time, Mariano wrote poems describing his life, friends, and family. The music portrays the nostalgia expressed in each of these poems entitled "Obsesión", "Regreso a Bogotá" and "Ester" written in 1914. For the centennial anniversary of these poems, I decided to set them to music written for the soprano voice in order to represent the emotions Ester would have felt upon reading them. This cycle was written for the tenth annual Barcelona Festival of Song and was premiered in June, 2014 by Patricia Caicedo and Nikos Stavlas in Barcelona, Spain.