“Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blüh’n?” (Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?) With this question the singer Anke Cordes and the pianist Bent Duddek open their talk concert Frauenbilder (“Images of Women”), which at first centres on Mignon, the novel character from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

Using the two poems “Kennst du das Land” and “Nur, wer die Sehnsucht kennt”, Cordes and Duddek trace in the first part of the programme the musical path these Mignon poems have taken through music history, showing how different composers have dealt with this many-sided figure. They present settings of these texts by, among others, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Fanny Hensel and Hugo Wolf.

In the second part of the concert, different types of women are placed side by side: Pirate Jenny and the kleptomaniac, women in love, and the strong, emancipated female characters that the artist Georgette Dee creates in her chansons give an insight into how, over the course of music history, liberty and expressiveness also found their way into the portrayal of women.