Pride & Pain – three programs, three Beethoven Symphonies
2024 - 2027
Riccardo Minasi, conductor
Ensemble Resonanz
Idea: Ensemble Resonanz
Program dramaturgy: Clemens K. Thomas & Ensemble Resonanz
Beethoven is European. So much, that it hurts.
Freedom, equality, fraternity, democracy, human rights, humanism - you name it. The figure of Beethoven is charged with so many things that we Europeans love and hold dear as claims or even achievements. And as how beautiful, how powerful, how certain of the power of shaping hands and directed towards a better future we consider the Beethoven experience to be - over and over again.
In three programs, this listening attitude undergoes a reality check.
Ensemble Resonanz takes the common Beethoven narrative, which has been consolidated over generations, and seeks a confrontation with those aspects of European reality that currently offer little cause for affirmative self-assurance, but rather place tension on the ideals associated with Beethoven. The Eroica encounters the story of the Sea Watch 3 and the handling of flight and migration at Europe's southern border. The idyll of the Pastoral Symphony resounds in connection with questions of common action against the threat to planetary livelihood. The powerful, triumphant Fifth Symphony resonates with the manifold after-effects of colonisation and imperialism.
A painful tension opens up between the values invoked and the multiple questioning of their current validity.
In this way, Beethoven perhaps actually does make us feel Europe: as pain.
