De Profundis

About this event

This concert opens the Bachchor Heidelberg’s 2026/27 season as the 1st Bachchor-Konzert and continues the longstanding collaboration between the Bachchor Heidelberg and the Philharmonisches Orchester Heidelberg, an amateur choir working with a professional orchestra that has shaped the city’s musical life for many years. The centerpiece is Hans Gál’s De profundis, op. 50, composed in Vienna in 1936/37 after Gál’s dismissal by the National Socialists. Dedicated to the memory of that period, its misery and its victims, the work was premiered only in 1948. The libretto draws on seventeenth‑century German poems about the Thirty Years’ War, whose images of want, destruction, and human suffering remain strikingly contemporary. The music spans grief and consolation, resignation and hope. Under the heading “1. Bachchor-Konzert: Hans Gál,” the program launches a four-concert season curated to present a broad panorama of sacred and choral‑orchestral repertoire.