In retrospect, the 1920s are regarded as an extraordinarily intense period marked by political and economic challenges. The English and French terms “Roaring Twenties” and “Années folles” highlight further facets of this decade, whose diversity is portrayed in this recital program. For example, one can experience the spirit of the youth of that era in Poulenc’s “Hôtel” (“Je ne veux pas travailler, je veux fumer” — “I don’t want to work, I want to smoke”) or experience Dadaism in sung form in Satie’s “Ludions,” while Roger Quilter represents English national music. D

he political currents of society at that time repeatedly come to light in the song lyrics and the composers’ biographies. While Hans Pfitzner was revered by conservatives as a German nationalist composer before the Third Reich
and expressed anti-modernist and anti-Semitic views in his writings, he was merely a marginal figure in Nazi Germany. Erich Wolfgang Korngold also did not compose in a modern style, but was forced to leave Austria in 1938. Hanns Eisler composed his “newspaper clippings”—which he had found by chance—as a protest against bourgeois concert lyricism and as an expression of the often precarious
living conditions of the working class in the big cities.
Monika Abel and Kathrin Isabelle Klein, nominated in 2025 for the German Record Critics’ Award, take the audience on a musical journey back to that era.