Protestcyclus op een tekst van Pablo Neruda over de moord op president Salvador Allende in 1973. Compositie Peter Schat.
Spaanse tekst van Pablo Neruda. In opdracht van het Bumafonds. - Geschreven voor Lucia Kerstens, Vera Beths en Reinbert de Leeuw. 1974. - Tijdsduur: ca. 25'

Uitvoeringen in het Amsterdams Electrisch Circus. 

The first performances of Canto General were given on the Amsterdam Electric Circus' Chile evenings in the summer of 1974 by Lucia Kerstens, Vera Beths and Reinbert de Leeuw. They gave rise to the question as to whether this kind of work is suitable for the open air, whether there is any sense in demolishing the Recital Room and rebuilding it in the Vondel Park, in the back yard of the Concertgebouw. Certainly, the performances demanded too much of the performers, and occasionally of the audience too. But the said question cannot be essentially answered by playing an empiric, adult Recital Room against an experimental circus still in its infancy.
Alturas de Macchu Picchu is a cycle of twelve poems - of which I selected the last - from the collection of Canto General. Verspoor writes about the title: "Macchu Picchu (pronounced 'Matchoo Pitchoo', meaning 'ancientpeak') is the legendary 'lost city of the Incas', perhaps even pre-Inca, at the literally breathtaking height of more than nine thousand feet, the splendid relic of a city, undiscovered until this century, of a complete civilization like the ones we are still busy destroying (... )" and like the imperialists got Chile into the murderous grasps of the generals. But not for ever.
For just as the living Allende obtained his weapon from Fidel, his fellow warrior in the Revolution, the dead hero of the Chilean people obtained more immortal weapons from his friend Neruda. They form the pillars of a bridge linking Chile's struggle with ours, a struggle that has a socialistically alive or imperialistically dead world at stake. In this awe-inspiring battle of human solidarity against despotic individualism, these lines will always hold good:

Sube a nacerconmigo, hermano.
Dame la manodesde la profunda
zona de tu dolordiseminado.

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hands out of the depths
sown by your own sorrows.

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