A concert of a special kind

I don't believe that anyone will last in this profession just because they are bothered by the way others sing. There may be a spark of "I want to try that differently", but there's a deeper drive behind it - an urge to communicate, to be the center of a room and let something flow through you that's bigger than your ego. I come from a family of singers and artists - honestly, I've been singing since I could talk. My sister is a professional Broadway singer and actress, and my brother is an exceptional performer in both musical theater and classical repertoire. My wife is an outstanding operatic soprano - one of the best crossover and musical theater singers I've ever known - and both of my parents were music educators for more than forty-five years. They taught us how profoundly music can change people, and that lesson is the main reason I became a singer. When you perform, you open a window to another world. If you allow yourself to be fully present in that moment, both you and the listener can change your perspective on life - and therefore reality itself.

I have witnessed this transformation countless times in my parents' lessons and performances; they have touched the lives of tens of thousands and helped others find joy, meaning and renewal through music. The indescribable joy of seeing lives transform before your eyes when a performance is characterized by sincerity is what fuels my love for this art. For me, the joy of making music and the urge to tell stories are inextricably linked. I have always been fascinated by how the human voice can transform a simple melody into a whole inner world. Today's program reflects this fascination. What interests me most is not to prove that I can sing Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and Korngold in a single evening, but to trace how an emotional question - how do we sing for the beloved who is absent, lost or beyond our reach? - appears again and again in different guises in their music.

As an opera singer, I can't help but bring a theatrical imagination to the song repertoire. By that I don't mean imposing operatic "effects" on the songs, but I see each cycle as a kind of compressed drama: I recognize a protagonist, a journey, a final state that is different from the starting point. An die ferne Geliebte is a miniature monodrama about separation and inner consolation; Mahler's Wanderer is as vividly drawn as any operatic wanderer; Korngold's "I" in Unvergänglichkeit passes through mourning to something like defiant transcendence, only to ultimately accept and even be grateful for the entire journey. Yes, in this sense I really do see these cycles as "mini-operas", with "my camera" not capturing the action on stage, but rather the inner life up close. The challenge is to preserve the intimacy of this form while at the same time making the long arc - the "plot" of the soul - tangible.

Working with songs has taught me to trust in small gestures, and this flows directly into my operatic singing. In lieder singing, you can't rely on costumes, staging or another character to explain what is happening; everything has to be contained in the sound, the text and the change of harmonies. This requires a finer mastery of timbre, textual emphasis and silence.
When I turn back to opera after studying this literature, I find that I have more nuance for the big phrases and more patience for the long scenes. A line from Wagner or Berlioz can be shaped with the same care that one devotes to a single Mahler stanza, and an orchestral echo on stage can "speak" just as freely as the echoes in An die ferne Geliebte or Morgen! Lieder recitals enable an intimate journey that is experienced and shared by performers and audience alike. And every time I give a recital, I am reminded to return to opera with the same vulnerability and honesty.

For me, the core idea is to trace a continuous emotional and musical arc that Vienna maintained over more than a century - from Beethoven's first romantic song to Korngold's farewell to this world. Adelaide is the prototype - a single, symphonic love song - and An die ferne Geliebte transforms this impulse into a veritable "song ring" in which longing becomes a continuous dramatic form.

Everything that follows is in some way a response to this invention. Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder, Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Strauss' Morgen! and finally Korngold's Unvergänglichkeit all take up the fundamental gesture that Beethoven had discovered: the voice that falls silent while the instruments carry the inexpressible to a higher place. But they all reinterpret this in their own language and their own historical moment. It is therefore fitting that a wedding present by Strauss stands alongside the almost secular Requiem An die ferne Geliebte and Mahler's Musik des Herzschmerzes - each work is a further twist of the same "Viennese spiral", which revolves around love, loss, longing, acceptance and transformation.

Hanslick's remark testifies to how revolutionary Adelaide was: Hanslick recognized that this one song had opened the door to a new kind of subjective, symphonic song art. For me, Adelaide is proof that Beethoven had discovered how far a solo voice and accompaniment could go to embody the theme of longing for what one does not have. It therefore feels right to open the evening with it. Before we can talk about cycles, returns and echoes, we start with the primal scene: a singer, an overflowing melodic line, a lover whose name becomes a kind of incantation. Everything we hear later - from the circular structure of An die ferne Geliebte to the orchestral transformations of Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and Korngold - grows out of Adelaide's unique musical gesture.

Definitely. The entire concept of the work revolves around the longing for the unattainable: The beloved is far away, perhaps spatially, perhaps temporally, perhaps in a more metaphysical sense, and the only bridge to it is a string of songs. At the same time, it is still a work of transition. The language and sound textures hark back to the clarity of classical music, but the idea of linking individual songs into a coherent "ring of emotions" is new and clearly points to Schubert, Schumann, Mahler - and beyond. In this sense, this cycle stands exactly where it does in today's program: on the threshold between classical order and romantic subjectivity.

Although both the Wesendonck Lieder and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are about unrequited love, they are characterized by very different emotional moods. Wagner's songs are like studies of unsatisfied desire; the atmosphere is sultry, perfumed, almost feverish, as if the whole world were to dissolve in an endless Tristan chord of ecstasy, leaving the listener with a sense of wonder. Mahler, on the other hand, is brutally concrete: we have weddings, fields, knives in the heart, dusty streets. The atmosphere is that of a man wandering through real landscapes, while his thoughts repeatedly slip into nightmares and memories. Where Wagner blurs the contours of reality through harmony, Mahler repeatedly returns to a folk-like clarity, only to shatter it. Both cycles deal with unfulfilled love, but one dreams it in slow motion, while the other staggers through the reality of unrequited love.

Strauss is complex and unashamedly ambivalent. In his operas, he can view infatuation with great irony - just think of the pompous tirades of the composer you mentioned or Octavian's youthful inconstancy - and yet in op. 27, especially in Morgen!, the enthusiasm and charisma seem completely sincere. As an interpreter, I think you have to make room for both possibilities. You have to fully engage with the ecstasy as if it were completely real at that moment - otherwise the music collapses - but you can also allow a tiny awareness of Strauss's knowledge of human nature to flow into the phrasing. Not to make fun of it, but to give it depth: We experience the joy of someone who understands how fragile joy is; after all, joy can only be fully experienced when one is aware of the opposite feeling of despair.

Correct: apotheosis and farewell. By returning to the same text and the same music in Unvergänglichkeit I and Unvergänglichkeit II, Korngold performs the clearest act of cyclical return since Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte: he not only takes up a theme again, but restages an entire song, albeit in a different context. At the end of this program, this gesture seems like the closing of a very long circle. Beethoven sends his songs to a distant lover and ends with the piano quietly recalling the beginning; Korngold lets the same song sound again in Vienna on the brink of catastrophe, transformed and radiant, and lets the orchestra glow out into the silence. Between these two acts of the return, an entire tradition has spoken - and then falls silent. That is why, for me, this cycle is not just the end of the evening, but the apotheosis of the whole story that the program is trying to tell.