Sacred Choral Music

RENAISSANCE II | Heinrich Schütz and Hugo Distler in the Shadow of War

with the presentation of the International Heinrich Schütz Prize

Hugo Distler (1908-1942) looked back with longing to the age of the Reformation, in whose worldview he found what his own time denied him: a unity that transcends the individual. The music of that era became both his model and his refuge.

While Heinrich Schütz's life and his "Sacred Choral Music" of 1648 were decisively shaped by the Thirty Years' War, Distler's life fell in an age of rising Nazism and the Second World War. His contemporaries Günter Raphael (1903-1960), Hermann Grabner (1886-1969), and Helmut Bornefeld (1906-1990) also oriented themselves toward Schütz, recognizing in his work a stance that seemed to them a guide for their own time.

The Dresden Chamber Choir brings together in this concert works that did not arise as a retreat from history, but can still be heard today as a testimony within it.