LICHT! 800 Years of German Lied

With the present programme we want to explore the history of the German Lied throughout a period spanning some 800 years, from that first light of dawn represented by the earliest music scored with modern notation - courtly love songs by Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377-1445) - down to such present-day emissaries of the Lied tradition as Aribert Reimann and Wolfgang Rihm. In between we find: J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, F.Hensel, Wolf, Berg and Eisler. The programme is rounded off, however, by the work of a political exile, Kurt Weill: namely, Berlin im Licht. This work appears initially to be no more than a love-song to the future of the electric light bulb: “Turn on the light; so you can see what’s wrong and what is right”. The deeper meaning was soon thrown into relief by the blotting out, within a few years of its composition, of both the light and the right to which Kurt Weill aspired and Germany’s swift descent into the darkness of dictatorship and war. A spark, however, still remained.