What brought Bach to Lübeck?
Bach in Lübeck:
In 1705, the young Johann Sebastian Bach made the 400 km journey on foot to the venerable Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck to hear the most famous organ master of his time: Dieterich Buxtheude. He extended the initially planned three weeks to almost four months! - What did Bach experience and hear that made him stay in Lübeck? We want to find out and bring Lübeck's musical life at the beginning of the 18th century to life.
It is perhaps a daring project to perform and record North German organ works in a chamber music setting. After all, this is music that could not be more instrument-specific and is considered untouchable, even sacred. Reverently, it in no way makes the great compositional style of Dieterich Buxtehude or Franz Tunder more incomprehensible, or even shrouds it in a fog in chamber music. - On the contrary: the fantastic fog that usually tends to form over this music clears and the listener approaches the composition in a completely new and individual way.
At the same time, Bach's study trip has become our study trip into the music of his time; in his eagerness and ambition to learn, we have also found a motto.
Inspiration : Idylle
For people in the 21st century, “idyll” can describe a seemingly paradisiacal landscape or a harmoniously transfigured state. We associate it with vast lake regions, impressive mountainous areas, elaborately designed gardens or babbling rivers. It appeals to us in a particularly positive way and is often a place of home or longing. The word has its ancient Greek origin, the term είδύλλιον or, even more reduced, εΐδος, perhaps a much simpler meaning, translated into German as “das Bild” (picture), “die Gestalt” (Figure) or “die Idee” (idea).
The Baroque in musical form can be found in (contemporary art) in a variety of pictorial forms. We would like to make this accessible to a wide audience, which is best achieved by placing the musical contributions in the context of the visual arts and creating a symbiosis that makes this culture “tangible” through hearing and seeing, with the help of professional image and sound recordings.
We want to stimulate reflection and win over today's generation for the far-reaching contextual confrontation with “old” music. The juxtaposition is just further proof that there is no such thing as “old” music, but that the same questions and conditions that preoccupied artists and people in the Baroque era are faced in a similar way by modern artists and people.
Music in conversation: More than in any other period, musicians and writers of the Baroque era attempt to depict and explain the state of mind of unrest and calm as differently and multifacetedly as possible, but also as comprehensibly as necessary.
There is hardly a shortage of examples from the period: epidemics, wars, enthusiasm and disillusionment repeatedly shake hands within a very short space of time, making it difficult for people at the time to believe in peace in any form. But: the world did not end. And neither did culture: it took up the challenge and grew enormously stronger.
If the war in Europe, pandemics, hardships and catastrophes of baroque proportions happen again after almost 400 years, we can be grateful that we are not the first generation to have had to endure this turmoil and even calm our troubled hearts with the certainty of the arts at that time.
