To escape into the countryside, to forget everyday life, to leave all duties, worries and social constraints behind. In the culture of the early Italian Baroque, the desire to escape from oppressive civilization has a name: Arcadia, the land of shepherds, eternal spring, love and poetry, where man lives in harmony with nature and mythical beings. The utopia of Arcadia, the idea of a symbolic ideal landscape that has fallen out of space and time, provides an occasion to question social norms, to let one's thoughts revolve around the possible, but also the impossible.
Ferrara 1580: In the spirit of the Renaissance as the rebirth of ancient culture, authors of antiquity who had left a lasting mark on the image of paradisiacal Arcadia were now being read and studied again. With the discovery of the works of Theocritus and Virgil, the idea of Arcadia also regained importance in early modern Italy, and new life was breathed into the figures of bucolic poetry such as Tirsi, Mopso, Fili, and Amarilli. As one of the most prominent representatives of Italian pastoral poetry, Torquato Tasso, known today primarily for Goethe's drama of the same name, dreams in his pastoral play "Aminta" (1573) of free love and shameless lust far removed from social conventions, far removed from questions of class and gender. But Arcadia, Battista Guarini responded with the play "Il pastor fido" (1580), remains a dream. Even in apparent innocence and naturalness, sin lurks. As much as one might dream of Arcadia, paradise was lost since long ago.
The program recreates this utopia with settings of texts by Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarini, among others, from their close surroundings at the court of Alfonso II d'Este in Ferrara. Works by Girolamo Frescobali, Claudio Monteverdi, Sigismondo d'India, Luzzascho Luzzaschi and Luca Marenzio will be performed.
The ensemble Musica getutscht, founded by the lutenist Bernhard Reichel, specializes in music from 1500 to 1650 and has set itself the goal of studying these 150 years intensively - not only in order to render music as historically informed as possible, but also to show the audience the art-historical, political and philosophical framework with which it is so closely connected. In addition to concerts at festivals throughout Germany, the ensemble oversees its own concert cycle in Bremen and Oldenburg and has collaborated with soloists such as Emma Krikby, Marie Luise Werneburg, Mechthild Karkow, Magdalena Podkoscielna, Anna Kellnhofer, Pia Davila, Mirko Ludwig, Claudius Kamp and Mirjam- Luise Münzel. In January 2022, the ensemble will make its debut at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.