Thirsty Nature

About the program

The program is dedicated to two composers who were already among the greats during their lifetime. Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel shared not only a long-standing friendship, common residences, and common colleagues and acquaintances, but also a love of nature and its floral splendor. The link between music and nature was poetry. The poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), a friend, inspired the young Handel with his volume of poems "Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott" (Earthly Pleasure in God) to write nine arias in the Italian style, which were not published until 1922 as a collection entitled "Neun deutsche Arien" (Nine German Arias) and made accessible to a wider audience. Telemann's "Singe-Spiel- und Generalbassübungen" appeared weekly in Hamburg in 1733 as individual practice songs for instruction in basso continuo playing. For this, he made use of various well-known poems by also B. H. Brockes, but also by J. J. D. Zimmermann and J. C. Günther. The fact that Handel set German, Italian and finally also English texts to music in the course of his life is shown in today's chamber music program in poetic form.

Come with us on a musical walk, which lets fantasy and gods' worlds sound on one side, as well as scientific "picture language" in the sense of the Enlightenment on the other side.