Name: Julian Prégardien & Kristian Bezuidenhout
Start: 2025-05-16T19:30:00
Location: Hunting Hall

Kristian Bezuidenhout

Julian Prégardien

Cornelia Weidner

SWR Symphonieorchester

"Love! Love! Let me go!" pleaded a man in 1775 who is today considered the most important German poet. The poem in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes a "sweet, loose girl" who held him "against her will" is entitled New Love, New Life , and its lines are by no means mere fantasy, but an expression of his own inner life. Torn between longing for love and the inability to commit to a permanent relationship, Goethe fell in love with numerous women, desired them, then left them again, was inflamed by new ones and wrote countless words on paper about them and his feelings. But who were the women he lost his heart to? Could Goethe actually love anyone other than himself? Were women perhaps just surfaces for him to project himself into? The tenor Julian Prégardien came across a painting in a museum that made a deep impression on him: blind spot by Margit Jäschke. The picture shows three women in long, colorful dresses gathered in front of a keyboard instrument. Their upper bodies and especially their faces are covered by a patchy white spot. Who were Goethe's women? How did they view their relationship with him, and what arts did they practice in the shadow of the great poet? The blind spot is a two-part evening with songs and poems by Franz Schubert, Fanny Hensel, Louise Reichardt and Bettina von Arnim, among others. In the first part we hear musical settings of verses in which the young poet deals with his three love affairs in Weimar. In the second part the women around Goethe, especially the artists, are given a stage. The actress Julia Nachtmann is here, and we are amazed to learn that not everything was as Goethe dreamed it would be. Or as he made it up. The German poet laureate was already a master of what we today call mansplaining. What a discovery!