Gerhard Hüsch
Encyclopedia
Gerhard Heinrich Wilhelm Fritz Hüsch (February 2, 1901November 23, 1984) was one of the most important German singers of modern times. A lyric baritone
, he specialized in Lieder but also sang, to a lesser extent, German and Italian opera
.
in 1901. He studied acting there as a young man but later took up singing, gaining experience at a series of provincial German theatres, proving to be a brilliant comic actor. Between 1925 and 1944, he was engaged to sing regularly in Berlin (most significantly at the Berlin State Opera
) and at several other leading opera venues in Germany and Austria. Such important overseas theatres as The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
, London, and La Scala
, Milan, heard him sing during the 1930s, when his international reputation attained its peak.
The operatic role for which he is perhaps best remembered is that of Papageno, in Mozart
's The Magic Flute
. (In 1937-38 he recorded a complete Papageno for HMV
, with Sir Thomas Beecham
conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
.) His stage repertoire, however, included most of the standard roles for the lighter baritone voice, including those of Wagner
. Indeed, he was invited to perform at the annual Bayreuth Festival
, most famously in 1930 and 1931 as Wolfram in Tannhäuser
, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini
. The vocal music of Richard Strauss
was familiar to him, too, and he took part in the premiere of Strauss's Intermezzo
.
He partnered many of Germany's best soprano
s, mezzo-sopranos, tenors and bass
es of the inter-war years, while Bruno Walter
completed a triumvirate of lastingly famous conductors with whom he appeared (the others being, as we have seen, Toscanini and Beecham).
Lacking the sheer vocal amplitude of his heroic baritone contemporaries Hans Hotter
and Rudolf Bockelmann
, Hüsch concentrated instead on investing his singing with an unfailingly smooth line, a rounded tone and beautifully lucid diction in the manner of a celebrated German lyric-baritone rival, Heinrich Schlusnus
, who was his senior by 13 years. Nowhere were these exemplary vocal qualities better displayed than in his pioneering, pre-war, 78-rpm Lieder records. He performed on disc the first more-or-less-uncut versions of Schubert
's Winterreise
and Die Schöne Müllerin
song-cycles, and Beethoven
's An die ferne Geliebte
; his discs of songs by Hugo Wolf
, made under Walter Legge
's auspices, helped introduce that composer to thousands of music-lovers previously unfamiliar with Wolf's output; and he released a generous selection of songs by Hans Pfitzner
, these recordings bearing the imprimatur of Pfitzner himself at the piano. The obscure Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen
found in Hüsch a steadfast champion.
On close listening, recordings show that Hüsch chose to intentionally 'under-sing', never pushing his upper register or inflating his tone beyond the limits of its natural resonance. Sometimes Hüsch performed in choral masterpieces as well. His recorded work in this field including an exceptional Jesus in a wartime set – severely abridged – with Günther Ramin
conducting, of Bach
's St Matthew Passion.
After World War II
, Hüsch, whose political naïveté during the Third Reich (and, in particular, his closeness to Rosalind von Schirach, the sister of prominent Nazi Baldur von Schirach
) was unlikely to endear him to the victorious Allies, mostly abandoned concert and operatic appearances, preferring to concentrate on teaching.
A professor at the Munich Hochschule für Musik, he numbered among his pupils the British tenor Nigel Rogers
and notably, James King. He also gave master classes in Europe and on a visit to Japan in 1952-53.
In 1977 through to 1981, Hüsch taught at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, where his private studio was small. He also taught the Master's and Doctoral courses in "song literature". In addition, during his three years in Bloomington, he offered students a seminar in Lieder interpretation for three days each week. Hüsch paired select singers and pianists in specific repertoire from Mozart and Beethoven to Kilpinen and Pfitzner.
Following Bloomington and a few guest masterclasses at University of Texas at Austin, he accepted a teaching post at University of Colorado Boulder for the 1982 academic year.
In 1984, at the age of 83, he died in Munich
.
Today, most of his large lieder and operatic discography has been reissued on compact disc
by various companies.
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
, he specialized in Lieder but also sang, to a lesser extent, German and Italian opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
.
Career
Hüsch was born in HanoverHanover
Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...
in 1901. He studied acting there as a young man but later took up singing, gaining experience at a series of provincial German theatres, proving to be a brilliant comic actor. Between 1925 and 1944, he was engaged to sing regularly in Berlin (most significantly at the Berlin State Opera
Berlin State Opera
The Staatsoper Unter den Linden is a German opera company. Its permanent home is the opera house on the Unter den Linden boulevard in the Mitte district of Berlin, which also hosts the Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra.-Early years:...
) and at several other leading opera venues in Germany and Austria. Such important overseas theatres as The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...
, London, and La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
, Milan, heard him sing during the 1930s, when his international reputation attained its peak.
The operatic role for which he is perhaps best remembered is that of Papageno, in Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
's The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
. (In 1937-38 he recorded a complete Papageno for HMV
HMV
His Master's Voice is a trademark in the music business, and for many years was the name of a large record label. The name was coined in 1899 as the title of a painting of the dog Nipper listening to a wind-up gramophone...
, with Sir Thomas Beecham
Thomas Beecham
Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...
conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
The Berlin Philharmonic, German: , formerly Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester , is an orchestra based in Berlin, Germany. In 2006, a group of ten European media outlets voted the Berlin Philharmonic number three on a list of "top ten European Orchestras", after the Vienna Philharmonic and the...
.) His stage repertoire, however, included most of the standard roles for the lighter baritone voice, including those of Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
. Indeed, he was invited to perform at the annual Bayreuth Festival
Bayreuth Festspielhaus
The or Bayreuth Festival Theatre is an opera house north of Bayreuth, Germany, dedicated solely to the performance of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner...
, most famously in 1930 and 1931 as Wolfram in Tannhäuser
Tannhäuser (opera)
Tannhäuser is an opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on the two German legends of Tannhäuser and the song contest at Wartburg...
, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
. The vocal music of Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
was familiar to him, too, and he took part in the premiere of Strauss's Intermezzo
Intermezzo
In music, an intermezzo , in the most general sense, is a composition which fits between other musical or dramatic entities, such as acts of a play or movements of a larger musical work...
.
He partnered many of Germany's best soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
s, mezzo-sopranos, tenors and bass
Bass (voice type)
A bass is a type of male singing voice and possesses the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C...
es of the inter-war years, while Bruno Walter
Bruno Walter
Bruno Walter was a German-born conductor. He is considered one of the best known conductors of the 20th century. Walter was born in Berlin, but is known to have lived in several countries between 1933 and 1939, before finally settling in the United States in 1939...
completed a triumvirate of lastingly famous conductors with whom he appeared (the others being, as we have seen, Toscanini and Beecham).
Lacking the sheer vocal amplitude of his heroic baritone contemporaries Hans Hotter
Hans Hotter
Hans Hotter was a German operatic bass-baritone, admired internationally after World War II for the power, beauty, and intelligence of his singing, especially in Wagner operas. He was extremely tall and his appearance was striking because of his high, narrow face, wide mouth, and big, aquiline nose...
and Rudolf Bockelmann
Rudolf Bockelmann
Rudolf Bockelmann was a German dramatic baritone and Kammersänger. He built an international career as an outstanding Wagnerian singer but damaged his reputation during the 1930s by joining the Nazi Party.-Biography:Bockelmann, the son of a village schoolmaster, was born at Bodenteich near Celle...
, Hüsch concentrated instead on investing his singing with an unfailingly smooth line, a rounded tone and beautifully lucid diction in the manner of a celebrated German lyric-baritone rival, Heinrich Schlusnus
Heinrich Schlusnus
Heinrich Schlusnus was Germany's foremost lyric baritone of the period between World War I and World War II. He sang opera and lieder with equal distinction.-Career:...
, who was his senior by 13 years. Nowhere were these exemplary vocal qualities better displayed than in his pioneering, pre-war, 78-rpm Lieder records. He performed on disc the first more-or-less-uncut versions of Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
's Winterreise
Winterreise
Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert , a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two great song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin...
and Die Schöne Müllerin
Die schöne Müllerin
Die schöne Müllerin , is a song cycle by Franz Schubert on poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the earliest extended song cycle to be widely performed. The work is considered one of Schubert's most important, and it is widely performed and recorded....
song-cycles, and Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
's An die ferne Geliebte
An die ferne Geliebte
, opus 98, is a composition by Ludwig van Beethoven in April 1816. It is considered to be the first example of a song cycle by a major composer.-Beethoven's :...
; his discs of songs by Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in...
, made under Walter Legge
Walter Legge
Harry Walter Legge was an influential English classical record producer, most notably for EMI. His recordings include many sets later regarded as classics and reissued by EMI as "Great Recordings of the Century". He worked in the recording industry from 1927, combining this with the post of junior...
's auspices, helped introduce that composer to thousands of music-lovers previously unfamiliar with Wolf's output; and he released a generous selection of songs by Hans Pfitzner
Hans Pfitzner
Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer and self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina, loosely based on the life of the great sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.-Biography:Pfitzner was born in Moscow, Russia, where his...
, these recordings bearing the imprimatur of Pfitzner himself at the piano. The obscure Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen
Yrjö Kilpinen
Yrjö Henrik Kilpinen was a Finnish composer. He was born in Helsinki, and in 1907 he started his studies in the Helsingin Musiikkiopisto . In 1910 Kilpinen moved to Vienna to continue his studies and from 1913 to 1914 he studied in Berlin.Kilpinen is most famous for composing 790 works in the...
found in Hüsch a steadfast champion.
On close listening, recordings show that Hüsch chose to intentionally 'under-sing', never pushing his upper register or inflating his tone beyond the limits of its natural resonance. Sometimes Hüsch performed in choral masterpieces as well. His recorded work in this field including an exceptional Jesus in a wartime set – severely abridged – with Günther Ramin
Günther Ramin
Günther Werner Hans Ramín was an influential German organist, conductor, composer and pedagogue in the first half of the 20th century....
conducting, of Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's St Matthew Passion.
After World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Hüsch, whose political naïveté during the Third Reich (and, in particular, his closeness to Rosalind von Schirach, the sister of prominent Nazi Baldur von Schirach
Baldur von Schirach
Baldur Benedikt von Schirach was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Vienna....
) was unlikely to endear him to the victorious Allies, mostly abandoned concert and operatic appearances, preferring to concentrate on teaching.
A professor at the Munich Hochschule für Musik, he numbered among his pupils the British tenor Nigel Rogers
Nigel Rogers
Nigel David Rogers is an English tenor, conductor, and teacher, who has made numerous recordings, mostly of early music.A native of Wellington, Shropshire, Rogers studied at King's College, Cambridge from 1953–1956, in Rome in 1957, in Milan from 1958–1959, and with Gerhard Hüsch at the Munich...
and notably, James King. He also gave master classes in Europe and on a visit to Japan in 1952-53.
In 1977 through to 1981, Hüsch taught at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, where his private studio was small. He also taught the Master's and Doctoral courses in "song literature". In addition, during his three years in Bloomington, he offered students a seminar in Lieder interpretation for three days each week. Hüsch paired select singers and pianists in specific repertoire from Mozart and Beethoven to Kilpinen and Pfitzner.
Following Bloomington and a few guest masterclasses at University of Texas at Austin, he accepted a teaching post at University of Colorado Boulder for the 1982 academic year.
In 1984, at the age of 83, he died in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
.
Today, most of his large lieder and operatic discography has been reissued on compact disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
by various companies.