[New] The Instinct to Sing

A Conversation with Thomas Hampson and Susan Zarrabi

Mr. Hampson, five years ago we talked about the Pierre Boulez Saal’s firstever Schubert Weekend. There have been several Schubert Weeks since then, and the repertoire has continuously expanded to include the decades immediately before and after Schubert. This season, for the first time, the perspective opens up far into the 19th and 20th centuries. How did this program come about?

Thomas Hampson Schubert is our guide, our muse, no question. His music embodies the quintessence of song, and of German lied in particular, and I think we’ve explored a lot of things over the last five years. But I also don’t want this week to turn into a kind of “Schubert club.” One option of course would be to focus on a specific aspect of his lied output each year—there’s certainly more than enough repertoire. From there you could slowly make your way to Schumann, to Brahms, and eventually to Liszt… We’ve actually done that to a certain extent over the last few years. I also don’t think it’s that important to really perform all 600 of Schubert’s songs. I’m more interested in discovering and showing what the artistic essence of a song or a lied is. Music doesn’t need words, and words don’t need music, but when they merge, a new art form is created—I’ve talked about that many times. Song is the testament and the diary of human existence, not something to entertain people. It starts with a thought or an emotion, a metaphor, an extramusical context that is expressed in words, which then inspires a composer to transform it into a musical setting. Anything we hear in that music, whether it’s a galloping horse or a gurgling stream or a spinning wheel, just takes us deeper into the human dimension, into the psychology of the moment. To me, that’s the essence of an art song. For all these different reasons, we decided to go a little further with the repertoire this year, up to the dissolution of tonality in the years just before World War I, and even beyond. We’ll see where this will lead us over the next couple of years. But Schubert remains our guiding star, not least because everyone admired and idolized him, from Mahler to Schoenberg. Each event this week has a strong connection to his work. By the way, there are also three all-Schubert programs.

You open your recital with songs by Carl Loewe and the Heine settings from Schubert’s Schwanengesang. The program’s second half takes the idea of “freedom” as a motto and includes works by a range of composers.

TH Loewe is very important to me. I’m really drawn to his songs, and I find the connection with Goethe and Heine especially meaningful.

Schubert’s Heine settings may be the most forward-looking songs he ever wrote. When you listen to them and study them, it really strikes you and you wonder where he might have gone if he had lived just another five years… And poems like Goethe’s Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’ or Ich denke dein are simply among the most beautiful in all of German literature. These are moments when time stops and we get to glory in our shared humanity. These pieces provide a sort of springboard, a jumping-off point for the second part of the program, which goes beyond these intimate moments and opens up a perspective of Weltanschauung, if you will. I’ve done several recitals inspired by the “freedom” theme in recent years. There’s obviously a certain ambiguity to it: which freedom are we talking about? What does freedom mean if it limits somebody else’s freedom? This doesn’t just relate to a situation of war, which many of these songs deal with. Freedom in that sense really means the individual right of self-determination, which in one way or another is threatened in these songs: we see a victim in the Zemlinsky, someone who is haunted and pursued in Mahler’s Revelge, or a lost soul in the Hindemith. That’s why I end the program with this tremendous piece by Walt Whitman and Leonard Bernstein, To What You Said. In the poem, Whitman really examines his entire life and the question of what freedom means—not just regarding sexual identity but also the challenge of recognizing yourself and acting freely as an individual in this world. This kind of psychological self-recognition is also an important part of Schubert’s Heine songs. In fact I think there are certain parallels between Heine and Whitman, but that’s another subject…

Susan, your program similarly includes a wide range of musical styles, from Loewe and Schubert to Wolf and Strauss, to Kurt Weill. What’s the idea behind it?

Susan Zarrabi With any recital, it’s always essential to me to have a thread that weaves through it—not necessarily musically or harmonically, but especially in terms of the poems. If I had to find a headline for this program, it could simply be called “Women.” I wanted to examine different female characters, “from saint to whore,” if you want to put it that way. My initial idea was to take all of Schubert’s songs that have a woman’s name as their title, but the result would have been a very one-dimensional picture. So I decided to combine this with other composers, including a woman, Emilie Mayer. Her song Das Schlüsselloch im Herzen, “The Keyhole in the Heart,” is about how love eventually finds a way into one’s heart. It fits very well between Schubert’s Die junge Nonne and Wolf’s Die Kleine, which both deal with doubt and desire and longing. I begin with Loewe’s Frauenliebe, “A Woman’s Love”—there we have the figure of a mother who speaks words of advice to her child. I wanted to open with that, so the program becomes a sort of life story: Where can your life’s path lead you? Which roads do you take? Where do you find guidance? At the end, we have Weill’s Der Abschiedsbrief and Die Kleptomanin by Friedrich Hollaender. There needs to be a bit of humor and irony as well!

From its inception, the Schubert Week has been a collaboration with the Lied Academy of the Heidelberger Frühling festival. Susan, you were part of the first workshop at the Pierre Boulez Saal in January 2018 and three years later returned to perform in the Young Singers series. But you first met Thomas Hampson in Heidelberg in 2016…

SZ I remember it very well because it was the first time I really got out of the conservatory and started looking beyond my own nose. It was my very first masterclass and it made a huge impression on me.

TH You came with this beautiful voice and a very charismatic approach to singing. That’s something you can’t teach. But I think in a way you hadn’t really started recognizing yourself. I remember the first piece we worked on was Mahler’s Rheinlegendchen, and as we got into some of the details, your initial reaction was, Wow, this is a lot more work that I thought! (laughs)

SZ (laughs) I learned a lot—let me put it that way! Just to feel the atmosphere together will all the colleagues, to take in the spirit of that place and situation was truly indescribable. And it’s the same here at the Pierre Boulez Saal. It’s never about elbowing your way through, which unfortunately, as we know, also happens quite a bit in our field. It’s always an exchange. Ours is such a small world, you see each other often and I love that. Many of the people I met in Heidelberg live here in Berlin and we get to support each other, go to each other’s concerts, and form a community. I think that’s important.

TH And it’s a constant process. You can’t become a singer unless you sing. As a teacher and mentor, the greatest challenge for me is to lend this kind of support because everything we do in class has to come out somewhere. I’m very pleased to have been part of your development as an artist, but at the end of the day it’s you who has to put it all together, and I’m very proud of the way you’ve done that. Our job is to provide a platform for our young colleagues, to give you the chance to sing. And for any young singer, the healthiest and most beautiful thing are songs, because they demand a very close connection between thought and sound.

SZ There’s this famous quote I’m always reminded of: tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. That’s Thomas Hampson to me. You’re so incredibly passionate about it, and you really inspired that love for singing this music in me—not just for singing it but also for coming back to it again and again and keep exploring these pieces. There’s an infinite number of details to bring out, especially compared to opera, where I spend most of my time these days. Having the opportunity to not only work on this but to perform this repertoire in a place like the Pierre Boulez Saal is a wonderful gift.

Part of the audience here in Berlin may not be aware that all of this is happening in cooperation with the Heidelberger Frühling, which established its own Lied Center in 2016. How did this collaboration start?

TH I’ve been artistic director of the Heidelberger Frühling’s Lied Academy since 2011, where I work closely with their intendant Thorsten Schmidt and his team. A few years later, when Daniel Barenboim had the idea of establishing a long-term lied project at the Pierre Boulez Saal—which hadn’t even opened at the time— my first thought was to somehow bring these two institutions together. I’m very happy with the way this partnership has evolved. You have to imagine it as a kind of rising spiral: every year there’s an application process, from which we select approximately 40 or 45 young musicians who are invited to audition in Heidelberg in the fall. After a first round I work with some of them in more detail, and from that group we eventually choose eight to ten singers and three or four pianists who get to participate in a workshop— we call them the scholars. The next period is the week here at the Pierre Boulez Saal, where the repertoire is 95 % Schubert. In April we meet again in Heidelberg for another three days, and in June we end there with the Heidelberger Frühling Lied Festival, which includes a working period part of which is open to the public. It makes for a very intense year. From this group of scholars who have gone through the program—there have been a few who came back for a second year—we select the fellows who get to perform half of a recital program here in Berlin as part of the Young Singers concerts. This isn’t because we don’t want it to be a full recital, but because that way we’re able to present a wider range of different voices. The wonderful thing is that these young colleagues get the opportunity to work with some of the best pianists in the world, including Malcolm Martineau and Graham Johnson this year. I like to compare it with handing them the keys to the Rolls-Royce and to tell them to go for a ride over the weekend. It’s a priceless experience for them.

Susan, what has this process been like for you over the course of several years?

SZ It’s been incredibly intense from the very beginning, especially when I first came to the Pierre Boulez Saal in 2018. Working so closely with everyone almost felt like being in a laboratory— very inspiring and also overwhelming in a good way. I was completely exhausted afterward. You get so much input and try to internalize it all and preserve it so you can come back to it. With singing, that’s often how it happens: you work on something but only get to reap the benefits months later.

How does a masterclass situation compare to what happens at a music conservatory?

SZ They are worlds apart, it’s a whole different cosmos. Here we have the chance to come together and explore the beautiful things in life, to really devote ourselves to them. It’s a form of self-discovery that’s very important to me as an artist. How are you going to come up with an interpretation if you can’t say: This is what I think about this particular subject. Otherwise you’re just repeating things and copying them. It’s about mastering the technical side to a certain degree and to then do justice to the higher idea, or at least to try. When you manage to reach that point at which you realize, I know the text, I know the music, I have a thought and the will to express it—to meet on that level and work with someone like Thomas is incredibly enriching. And that’s true not only in terms of being actively involved but also as you listen to others during a masterclass, for example if someone is working on a song you’ve performed yourself and you might think: I would have done this completely differently…

TH This is an important aspect—we’re looking at two distinct situations. I always make it clear to say: I’m not your voice teacher. When you’re working on a sensitive issue, vocally or technically, you have to approach it in relation to what that person has been doing in their regular studies. That’s why I’ll sometimes ask: How far is this from what you’re used to? Has anyone ever mentioned this to you? To teach singing has a lot to do with semantics and personal perspective. But even if we understand or express things differently, the goal is always the same. First and foremost, it’s a process that’s flexible and alive, and I really enjoy this kind of collaboration. In any teacher-student setting, but especially in singing, it’s never about climbing down from Mount Parnassus and saying: This is how it works. Each voice, each personality is unique. I don’t believe in any specific