Pianist Sophia Weidemann and actress Tinka Kleffner present a musical-literary encounter with the exceptional composer Fanny Hensel in their new GENUIN album, "Das Jahr" (The Year). The album includes a remarkable piano cycle along with letters and diary entries to and by Hensel. Through their interpretation, these two highly acclaimed artists offer a high-level, intimate glimpse into the life and work of one of the most significant 19th-century female composers and enlightened thinkers, Fanny Hensel. Hensel's piano cycle covers a whole year, and the chosen and thoughtfully read excerpts mirror the emotionally rich and skillfully constructed music in the most delightful way!

A young female singer in 17th-century Venice: she is virtuoso, attractive and extremely charming, and the gentlemen of her select audience are at her feet. They call her the ""Singing Venus"". But Barbara Strozzi wants more: she regularly publishes her compositions – more than any woman before her. The new BR-KLASSIK audio biography tells her story. Until the 20th century, female composers had a hard time in a male-dominated art. And in historiography for even longer: it was not until 1978 that a female American musicologist published the first specialist article on Barbara Strozzi.

Heinz Marecek tells the story of the shipwrecked sailor Enoch Arden. A melodrama of sound based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, as gripping as Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe, composed in a phase between the symphonic poems "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and the orchestral works "Don Quixote" and "A Hero's Life".

What do we actually know about Johann Sebastian Bach? Rather little, one must admit. Nevertheless, the few documents provide a fragmentary but very vivid picture of life. The new BR-KLASSIK audio biography shows Bach against the background of a distant time that is rather foreign to us, which is brought to life in many voices together with his music. Udo Wachtveitl tells the unique life and work of the Thomaskantor and most important composer of classical music. Albrecht Schuch gives Bach his voice.

The Italian poet, essayist and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was always an independent and unsparing chronicler of his time. In these texts, he tirelessly denounces social ills in his country; but his Catholic faith and the question of the art of poetry, too, run like strands through his work. "He wanted to celebrate the festival of life, the flower of passion, the flower of play, and finally, as an extreme action, the flower of death, his death," Wolf Wondratschek writes in his accompanying text.

Christoph Martin Wieland's “Der Vogelsang oder die drey Lehren” – “The Songbird or The Three Lessons” – first appeared in March of 1778 in the literary-political magazine “Der Teutsche Merkur”, which he edited, with the note “Based on the Lays de l'Oiselet in Fabliaux et Contes etc. Vol. 1. p. 179,” referring to a French poem from the 13th century.