Some time ago Dorothee Mields asked me if we could perhaps perform some songs by Friedrich Hollaender. A glance at the fragile manuscript of his Lieder eines armen Mädchens (1921–24) revealed many similarities with the songs of the seventeenth century. The printed editions and manu- script scores that have come down to us from the early Baroque contain very little information and yet they conceal within them whole worlds of musical expression.
And then the year 2018 arrived, with its linking lines going back to 1618 and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War and to 1918, the end of the First World War. We have placed the First World War within the context of the period from 1914 to 1945, resulting in a further Thirty Years War. Both of these periods ended in extensive changes to existing political systems.
What are the links between works written over a three-hundred-year period? In all of the vocal pieces that are included in this release it is the words that provide this link – all are text-related. The German musicians and poets at the time of the Thirty Years War were all part of the sixteenth-century tradition of the Reformation and as such were looking for new forms for the German language and for new ways in which that language could develop. In their attempt to lend a common impulse to language and literature these poets and musicians formed groups and societies that may nowadays strike us as comical. Their number included the poets and musicians featured in this recording. (Wolfgang Katschner)
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