“Because I Live” – The Heinrich Schütz Music Festival in the 350th Year of His Death

Newly discovered through a different lens, the music of Heinrich Schütz has been embraced by Nicola Hümpel, director and artistic head of the collective Nico and the Navigators. "Fleisch & Geist" is the scenic production she premiered at the Schütz Music Festival. “I admit I initially had my reservations, but they have now disappeared. I have come to appreciate and even to love much of Schütz’s music – largely because we approached it with such freedom.”

"Fleisch & Geist" by Nico and the Navigators is a panorama of human brilliance and, at the same time, of human abysses. …

The cast also included two female singers, one male singer, a female dancer and two male dancers. With enormous expressive power and physical commitment, at times bordering on acrobatics, they demonstrated what happens when flesh gains the upper hand over spirit – for director Nicola Hümpel a subject of burning relevance: “The bitter realisation is that thousands of years of evolution and cultural history can ultimately be overthrown by the will of a single person – the result may be an atomic bomb. In the end, all the knowledge we have acquired over millennia, all the culture we have created, is at stake. I don’t think any artist can step onto the stage at the moment without carrying the weight of current events.”

In the end, the stage becomes a battlefield. Books lie shredded everywhere, the protagonists are half-dead or entirely lifeless. Flesh has triumphed over spirit, over human culture. The audience is left bewildered. A way out? Perhaps in turning back to Heinrich Schütz, who, in the dark times of the Thirty Years’ War, was hailed as the Lumen Germaniae – the “Light of Germany.”

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