What is the best way to compare all the young voices of the upcoming generation of opera singers? You get them all to sing the same song. It is likely that this thought will have played a role when the organizers of the DEBUT 2018 Classical Singing Competition were planning the event for the ninth time. As an additional aspect, the lieder as an art form, as an integral element of vocal training, will be given even greater prominence than in the past. When the competition week of the international singing contest begins in Weikersheim and Bad Mergentheim on September 23, the participants will find a contemporary lieder on their music stands that was written by someone from their own age group – Konstantin Heuer.
The 29-year-old is a former winner of the Gaudeamus prize, an important competition for young composers. This is what brought him to the attention of Clarry Bartha, DEBUT's Artistic Director. From this, the idea of a "competition lieder" evolved. In his piece "Über uns beide" (The two of us), composed especially for DEBUT, Heuer set to music the poem "Die Liebe" (Love) by Else Lasker-Schüler, which was first published in 1905 in a book of poetry called "Der siebente Tag" (The Seventh Day). Every singer from the semifinal onwards must perform it.
Scope for interpretation
"It is quite normal for a specific framework to be set for commissions and this means that certain requirements must be met. The remit for the DEBUT competition was to write a repertoire piece that can be sung by any trained voice. I found that an exciting challenge," said Heuer, who hails from Leipzig. What was particularly important to him was to compose a piece that offered scope for interpretation.
Heuer took great care when choosing the text. "There are always a number of poetry books on my desk and I keep a list of texts and authors that I find compelling in my head. I actually went through Else Lasker-Schüler's complete literary oeuvre to find a text for the DEBUT competition that was original, expressive and multidimensional yet at the same time easily accessible – in other words, something that was particularly suitable as a standalone repertoire piece for a singing competition.
Anyone registering for the competition was able to download the text and score for the song, for which Heuer has also provided orchestration, from the website https://www.debut.de/en/
Music came from singing
It is something very special for him to be a composer at DEBUT. "It’s a great opportunity to show you can produce a general score that can be interpreted in many different ways and used to assess the quality of singers yet is still a very personal, emotional and intimate piece."
Naturally, a commission to compose a work always ends with a score, at which point the job is, as it were, complete. "As composers, we always depend greatly on what interpreters do with our notes. A song is not music until it is sung," explains Heuer, a former scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. This makes DEBUT all the more exciting for him to see what so many voices will do with his music.
Heuer will naturally also travel to the Tauber Valley region for the competition. For the matinée at 11 o'clock on Sunday, September 16, he will be sitting on the stage of the Small Kursaal in Bad Mergentheim together with Enrico Calesso, Music Director of the Main-Franconia Theater in Würzburg, to take part in a discussion on "Singing! Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow". Tickets are still available from the box office. Konstantin Heuer will also be in attendance for the entire week of the competition, listening with anticipation to see how the different voices interpret his lieder and the various other pieces.
The 29-year-old is a former winner of the Gaudeamus prize, an important competition for young composers. This is what brought him to the attention of Clarry Bartha, DEBUT's Artistic Director. From this, the idea of a "competition lieder" evolved. In his piece "Über uns beide" (The two of us), composed especially for DEBUT, Heuer set to music the poem "Die Liebe" (Love) by Else Lasker-Schüler, which was first published in 1905 in a book of poetry called "Der siebente Tag" (The Seventh Day). Every singer from the semifinal onwards must perform it.
Scope for interpretation
"It is quite normal for a specific framework to be set for commissions and this means that certain requirements must be met. The remit for the DEBUT competition was to write a repertoire piece that can be sung by any trained voice. I found that an exciting challenge," said Heuer, who hails from Leipzig. What was particularly important to him was to compose a piece that offered scope for interpretation.
Heuer took great care when choosing the text. "There are always a number of poetry books on my desk and I keep a list of texts and authors that I find compelling in my head. I actually went through Else Lasker-Schüler's complete literary oeuvre to find a text for the DEBUT competition that was original, expressive and multidimensional yet at the same time easily accessible – in other words, something that was particularly suitable as a standalone repertoire piece for a singing competition.
Anyone registering for the competition was able to download the text and score for the song, for which Heuer has also provided orchestration, from the website https://www.debut.de/en/
Music came from singing
It is something very special for him to be a composer at DEBUT. "It’s a great opportunity to show you can produce a general score that can be interpreted in many different ways and used to assess the quality of singers yet is still a very personal, emotional and intimate piece."
Naturally, a commission to compose a work always ends with a score, at which point the job is, as it were, complete. "As composers, we always depend greatly on what interpreters do with our notes. A song is not music until it is sung," explains Heuer, a former scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. This makes DEBUT all the more exciting for him to see what so many voices will do with his music.
Heuer will naturally also travel to the Tauber Valley region for the competition. For the matinée at 11 o'clock on Sunday, September 16, he will be sitting on the stage of the Small Kursaal in Bad Mergentheim together with Enrico Calesso, Music Director of the Main-Franconia Theater in Würzburg, to take part in a discussion on "Singing! Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow". Tickets are still available from the box office. Konstantin Heuer will also be in attendance for the entire week of the competition, listening with anticipation to see how the different voices interpret his lieder and the various other pieces.
