Kaspar Kröner - Hercules (Ein Pasticcio aus Werken von Georg Friedrich Händel und Johann Sebastian Bach) (2020)

It is a well-known story: The hero Hercules (Greek: Herakles) is walking in the mountains of Kithairon when he suddenly meets two female figures, Voluptas (pleasure) and Virtus (virtue), at a fork in the road. The two try to win over the young demigod. At the end of the commercials, Hercules associates himself with virtue and subscribes to its ideals.

The virtue aspect of this story from ancient mythology made it a popular subject in the Christian world as well. On September 5, 1733, for the eleventh birthday of the Saxon Crown Prince Friedrich Christian, Johann Sebastian Bach performed the dramma per musica he designed, “Let's take care, let's wake up” BWV 213 with his Collegium musicum. In the summer of 1750, 17 years after Bach and immediately before his last trip to Germany, Georg Friedrich Handel dealt with the subject in London - the result was "The Choice of Hercules" HWV 69.

Handel and Bach, born about four weeks apart and 150 km apart, never met in person. With the combination of the two Hercules works in a pasticcio, a virtual encounter between the two composers is now taking place for today's audience. In the times of Bach and Handel, the pasticcio practice was a common method, especially in the opera business, to combine different pieces of music, preferably by several composers, into a new work. The fact that they sometimes sang in different languages ​​during a performance did not detract from the effect and popularity. Also in the “Hercules” pasticcio, conceived by Clemens Flämig and published as a double CD as part of the “haendeliana hallensis” CD series, there are English and German texts.