Spott

Barthold Heinrich Brockes wrote a libretto on the Passion of Christ – based on the account in Matthew’s Gospel – which was set to music by many composers of his time, including Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philip Telemann and George Frideric Handel.

A young female singer in 17th-century Venice: she is virtuoso, attractive and extremely charming, and the gentlemen of her select audience are at her feet. They call her the ""Singing Venus"". But Barbara Strozzi wants more: she regularly publishes her compositions – more than any woman before her. The new BR-KLASSIK audio biography tells her story. Until the 20th century, female composers had a hard time in a male-dominated art. And in historiography for even longer: it was not until 1978 that a female American musicologist published the first specialist article on Barbara Strozzi.

A magnificent oratorio, long forgotten, has been rediscovered in Leipzig. Gregor Meyer conducts the Gewandhaus Chorus and the camerata lipsiensis in Friedrich Schneider’s Das Weltgericht. The composer, pianist, organist, and Anhalt-Dessau court music director Friedrich Schneider was one of the most creative and productive minds in the Central German music world during the first half of the nineteenth century but today is unfortunately a forgotten man. Das Weltgericht was once one of the most famous German oratorios, inspired euphoric headlines everywhere when it was first composed, and occasioned genuine storms of enthusiasm among concertgoers. The libretto is by August Apel, who based his text on the biblical accounts of the Last Judgment in Matthew 24-25 and the Revelation of John. A plot in the strict sense is not narrated; rather, the persons are biblical messengers who tell us of heaven, hell, and earth. This oratorio situated between classicism and romanticism was often performed but then was forgotten for many decades.