On June 17th and 18th, 2022, the Early Music Festival will take place for the 23rd time in the inspiring rooms of the Museum for Musical Instruments at the University of Leipzig in GRASSI. Under the Bach Festival motto “Bach – We are family”, students and lecturers present the extensive spectrum of the early music department of the “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” University of Music and Performing Arts in Leipzig.
The festival will open on Friday, June 17th at 7.30 p.m. in the Grassi Museum with the opera production “La Resurrezione” by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759).
When the young 21-year-old Handel arrived in Rome in 1706 (this is where he mostly lived and worked for the next four years), he quickly became the city’s new music star. The powerful and art-loving Cardinals Ottoboni, Pamphili, Colonna and Ruspoli (the latter will become his ‘permanent’ employer) competed for the works of ‘Caro Sassone’, the ‘Precious Saxon’, as Handel was fondly and admiringly called by the Romans.
The best musicians and singers of the time were available to him in the private chapels of the cardinals and the pope. And so, in a frenzy, he composed around 100 cantatas alongside oratorios and Catholic church music, in which he was able to combine a unique wealth of timbres, instrumental solos and virtuoso vocal lines. From the hundreds of melodies of this creative explosion he will draw the rest of his life as if from an enormous quarry of ideas.
The oratorio “La Resurrezione” (“The Resurrection”), written for Easter 1708, was intended as a scenic production from the start. In the accounts of the household of the Ruspoli, where the work was first performed in their Bonelli palace under the direction of A. Corelli, there is evidence that several craftsmen were commissioned to build a stage and scenery.
Musically, too, the work feels more like an opera than a sacred oratorio (which at the time led to ill-feeling with the Pope, who had banned such dramatic “pleasures”). In terms of content, two linked storylines offer dramatic conflict: on the one hand the fight between the devil Lucifer and an angel, on the other hand the despair over the death of Jesus and the hope of salvation through his resurrection of the three other protagonists Mary Magdalene, Mary of Cleophas and disciple John.
“La Resurrezione” fascinates musically with wild, bold harmonies, virtuoso vocal and instrumental parts and the unmistakable character of each individual number created by boundless imagination … Parts for obligatory orchestral instruments such as trumpet, oboe, recorder, transverse flute, viola da gamba and theorbo make up the piece one of Handel’s most colorful and refined compositions in terms of sound.
On Saturday, June 18, there will be concerts at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. and a children’s concert at 2.30 p.m. in the rooms of the Museum of Musical Instruments.
At 7:30 p.m. in the foyer of the Grassi Museum, the event concludes with an Academy Concert performed by a vocal and instrumental ensemble specializing in early music. It has the motto “Where is my wish, my song?”, and under the direction of Prof. Stephan Rath, vocal and instrumental works by the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach will be performed: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian .
Tickets available from the Bach Festival ticket office and the Museum of Musical Instruments at the University of Leipzig, Tel. 0341/9730-750 or [email protected]
Friday, June 17th – Saturday, June 18, 2022, Museum of Musical Instruments at the University of Leipzig, Johannisplatz 5-11
Old Music Festival
in cooperation with the Leipzig Bach Festival
Motto: „Bach – We are family“
General management: Prof. Stephan Rath
Project of the early music department
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