The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe
is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and
21st centuries above all as the writer of important
ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkönig,
Herr Oluf and Archibald Douglas are well-known
examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler
were or are popular hits, especially in a bygone
heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois
culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs.
But the same Carl Loewe also wrote six operas,
two symphonies and two piano concertos as well
as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all
of which have fallen into oblivion. With the present
oratorio, the Arcis Vocalisten, led by Thomas
Gropper, are vehemently opposed to oblivion.