CANCELLED: Symphoniker Hamburg / Sylvain Cambreling

Beethoven composed his incidental music to Goethe’s tragedy »Egmont« in 1810. An anonymous reviewer wrote two years later: »Beethoven’s original style radiates from this music as in all his works. One recognises it immediately in the opening bars.« The story of Egmont is set at the outset of the Eighty Years’ War (1566-1648) and outlines the fate of the Dutch Count Egmont von Gavre, who was defeated dramatically by the conflict between his love of liberty and the restrictions imposed by the Spanish occupation.

Gustav Mahler allowed himself many a liberty when setting to music a selection of folk songs from the collection»Des Knaben Wunderhorn«, assembled by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim between 1805 und 1808. For some of the songs, Mahler merged several texts, some of them very different from one another, and interpreted the content of the songs in a manner of his own devising, sometimes brutally explicit, sometimes full of light-hearted humour. The topics are love, death, nature and, last but not least, the supposedly unspoilt children’s world in the countryside.