Natur - Liebe - Tod

The great lyric poet of the Göttingen circle Ludwig Hölty, was considered by Werner Egk to be ‘as familiar and beloved as Mozart as a composer’. When Egk received a commission to compose a work for the 200th anniversary of the University of Göttingen, he selected the sequence of poems Natur - Liebe - Tod [nature - love - death] as the text for a four-part cantata. The second movement corresponds to our theme: a setting of Hölty’s poem “An die Nachtigall”, in which the poet urges the nightingale to cease singing as this is a painful reminder of his unfulfilled love.