In this subject, "Man and Machine", the triad consisting of Georg Katzer's personality, his general and musically highly differentiated thinking and feeling, as well as his composing, forms a unity of simultaneously almost infinitely unfolding diversity. For him, there is no one-dimensional either-or. Through music, his all-encompassing world view - shaped by humanism and interpreting man as a holistic being - determines his artistically discursive view of the subject "man and machine", which is at times highly emotional.
The texts of all four works on this CD refer to L' homme machine (Man a Machine), a radical pamphlet published in 1748 by the 18th century French poet, philosopher, and thinker Julien Offray de La Mettrie in favour of the French Enlightenment. He had to flee from the Jesuits to Prussia in October 1748 and was granted asylum by the Prussian King Frederick II. The encounter with de La Mettrie's writings and his all-encompassing view of the subject of "man and machine" triggered the final impulse in Georg Katzer to comprehensively address the subject artistically, the problems of which had confronted him in everyday life in the GDR for all too long.
Georg Katzer, born in in 1935, studied composition in East Berlin and at the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague. He was a Master's student under Hanns Eisler at the Academy of Arts of the GDR, to which he was elected a member in 1978, and later appointed Professor of Composition. He founded the Studio for Electroacoustic Music here in 1982, of which he was Artistic Director until 2005. Georg Katzer died at the age of 84 on 7 May 2019 in Berlin.
