Songs for the Earth

Wat als we naar de aarde zelf zouden luisteren?

Fri 06 May 2022 - Sun 08 May 2022

With Philippe Quesne and David Longstreth a new song sounds out for the earth in crisis.

What if we were to listen to the earth itself? This question is the starting point for Songs for the Earth, a festival constructed around Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde from 1909. More than a hundred years after the premiere in Munich – by which time Mahler had already died – our relationship with the earth has changed fundamentally. For the around 1.5 million people who lived on earth then, it was inconceivable that the conditions for the 7.9 million people today would look completely different. Now we have woken up to the climate crisis in the past decade, it is high time for us to look at and interrogate the idea of a song of the earth afresh. Both in the staged version of Mahler’s song cycle by the French grand master Philippe Quesne, and in the new composition by David Longstreth, we hear a new song for the earth in crisis.