Karl Pooper

After the dearth of major festivals in the middle of the weeks following Trinity Sunday, the end of the Lutheran church year sees two important ones, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels and Reformation Day. Both fall on fixed dates, so that their position in relation to the numbered Sundays after Trinity varies from year to year. Reformation Day celebrates Martin Luther’s historic nailing of his 95 Theses to the door of the church of Wittenberg Castle, and it is observed on the anniversary of the event, 31 October (except in a few places which chose to do so on the Sunday following that date).

"The Austrian conductor Karl Böhm is one of the towering conductors of the 20th Century. As the embodiment of the long Austro-German musical tradition, he helped to write musical history. This 19-CD set assembles all the extant recordings he conducted for EMI (notably its German Electrola label) over the period 1935 to 1949 in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna and London includes a number of rarities and the world premiere release of a version of Mozart’s Serenata notturna recorded in Vienna in 1947.

This section contains cantatas for the Sixth to Seventeenth Sundays after Trinity: a period when no festivals occur. The same is often said of the whole of the second half of the church year but that is not altogether true. There are no major feasts between the Visitation on 2 July and Michaelmas on 29 September but the intervening weeks are far from drab and uneventful. To this day, each single Sunday in the period spotlights an important event in Christ’s ministry on earth, and the cantatas selected for this section almost all refer to that and only exceptionally and less pointedly to the Epistle for the day.

Edith Mathis, who celebrated her 80th birthday last year, is one of Lucerne’s most famous “daughters”. The 1960s saw her firmly establish herself on the international opera stage. She enthused audiences in New York and London, in Munich, Vienna and Paris, at Glyndebourne and Salzburg, working alongside all major conductors of her time, from Karl Böhm to Herbert von Karajan. The grace and natural charm of her iridescent, silvery soprano voice was inescapable. Mozartian roles in particular, such as Cherubino, Susanna and Pamina, found their ideal representation in Edith Mathis: she shaped the Mozart sound of her time. But her performances of the Bach passions, Haydn oratorios, as Ännchen in Weber’s Der Freischütz or as Sophie in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier were met with equal enthusiasm. She also set the benchmark as a song recitalist, including in the summer of 1975 in her home city of Lucerne.

The lasting fame of conductor Karl Böhm is based on qualities that have been attested to him with great unanimity by listeners, musicians and critics throughout his long professional life: Discipline, rigor and precision in the elaboration of compositions and, at the same time, unpretentious stepping back behind the work and the composer in performance.

Unser Bild von Karl dem Großen ist das des mächtigsten Kaisers des Mittelalters. Noch heute betrachtet man ihn in Frankreich und Deutschland als Stammvater der Nation. Der Dreiteiler erweckt eine Figur zum Leben, die als "Vater Europas" ein Imperium schuf, dessen Spuren bis in die Gegenwart reichen.