About the album
In this subject, “Man and Machine,” the triad formed by Georg Katzers's personality, his highly differentiated thinking and feeling in both general and musical terms, and his composing, comes together to form a unity of almost infinitely unfolding diversity. For him, there is no one-dimensional either/or. His all-encompassing worldview, shaped by humanism and interpreting humans as holistic beings, determines his artistically discursive, sometimes highly emotional view of the subject “Man and Machine” through music.
The texts of all four works on this CD refer to the visionary, far ahead of its time, L’homme machine (Man a Machine), a radical pamphlet in favor of the French Enlightenment published in 1748 by the 18th-century French poet, philosopher, and thinker Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who was forced to flee from the Jesuits to Prussia in October 1748 and was granted asylum by the Prussian king Frederick II. His 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 turn his attention to the subject in a comprehensive artistic way, having been confronted with its problems for far too long in everyday life in the GDR.