The marriage of heaven and hell

Geert Wachtelaer's picture
The marriage of heaven and hell

In this multimedia-project, the Vlaams Radio Koor focuses on the romanticist William Blake. This Englishman was an artistic jack-of-all-trades: painter and poet, engraver and editor. As a very young man, he already rebelled against the prevailing values of his time. In his literary work he expressed his own philosophical and religious ideas, but his difficult, mystical poems were not read by many people. His shorter poems, on the contrary, caught the attention of a much broader public. Moreover, his texts were a source of inspiration to many composers. Blake's most important prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , a text from 1790 about the longing for freedom, was set to music by the Danish composer and conductor Bo Holten. The Belgian Lucien Posman composed work for choir, based on Blake's poems. Conducted by Johan Duijck, this concert by the Vlaams Radio Koor will be a full programme, in which music, image and word melt together into a tribute to the visionary William Blake.