With the present album, I have attempted to divine the sensitivities of man at the time of the German Enlightenment (1720-80) by means of the song collections available to me.

 

During this period of the emergent middle classes, in which many people could not yet read or write, poets and musicians attempted to capture the spirit of the time and to point out its ideals in the small form of the art song. Freedom instead of absolutism, equality instead of the system of the estates, scientific cognition instead od prejudice and superstition, tolerance insteadof dogmatism - these were the ideas of this new era, which were optimistically called for by the educated middle classes and the students stemming from them. Johann Christoph Gottsched demanded of contemporary poets that, in the sense of the Enlightenment, they be the educators of their readership. It is thus not surprising that instructing the contemporaries stands in the foreground in these songs.

 

Whereas in the majority of the poems this is done in a moralizing tone of voice, in my selection I have often taken into account pieces that expose human shortcomings by means of irony and with a wink of the eye. The different kinds of characters in society are caricatured, or humorously criticized. The newly awakened self-awareness of the women, who were finding their way into the German universities, prompted satirical songs. The common grammatical sloppiness in Low German, which does not differentiate between "er-soffen" (drown) and "ver-soffen" (drunken), is just as much the target of satire as the iniquities in the literary scene, where intellectual property is stolen for one’s own advantage and the battle between the old and the new is fought. Whoever wants to challlenge the master’s claim of infallibilty - which is occasionally still to be encountered today as various universities - is served just as well, as he inquires about the quickest way to a great career in society; the valid answer is slwats the same: "seyd dumm und reich! "be dumb und reich!")

 

Martin Hummel -