Event

The KlangForum Heidelberg performs early chants by Machaut, new arrangements of selected chansons by Barbara, and a world premiere by Philipp Maintz.

The singer and author Barbara continues to fascinate to this day: the literary quality of her lyrics, her precise rhetoric and vocal technique, her clever arrangements and elegant agogics –and, moreover, she was one of the first singers to write her own lyrics. To honor her from the perspective of classical music, the KlangForum Heidelberg reaches far back into the past, to the songwriter par excellence Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377).

In Barbara’s charismatic voice, words, rhetoric, and music merge into a single sensory plane, and the songs of the old master Machaut function in much the same way; after all, he was at least as much a poet as he was a composer. It was only in the centuries following Machaut that sound became sufficiently detached from the word to acquire its own level of meaning in classical music: herein lies the contrast between French chanson and, for example, the Romantic art song – and this is precisely where the world premiere of Philipp Maintz’s "schwarze lieder, spott-verse und ein galgenlied" comes into play. The texts set to music by Wilhelm Busch, Arno Holz, and Christian Morgenstern hold up a distorting mirror to the audience with a cheeky grin, thereby continuing the classical tradition of the sharp-tongued art song cycle.

An interactive, performative introduction to our KlangClub will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the new foyer of the Betriebswerk – so be sure to arrive on time so you don’t miss it!

SCHOLA HEIDELBERG
ensemble aisthesis
Direction and audiovisual design | Ekkehard Windrich