Musicologist Professor Ulrich Konrad on the DEBUT matinée on September 16 at 11 a.m. in Bad Mergentheim
2018 is once again DEBUT year: young opera singers will be coming from all over the world to participate in the 9th DEBUT 2018 Classical Singing Competition. A matinée concert will be held at 11.00 a.m. on Sunday September 16 before the forty-five young women and men who have been selected to appear before an independent jury begin singing on September 23 in the competition week of the international singers’ competition in Weikersheim and Bad Mergentheim. The spotlight at the concert in the Small Kursaal in Bad Mergentheim under the title of “Singing! Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow” will be on song itself.
On the stage will be Enrico Calesso, Music Director of the Main-Franconia Theater in Würzburg, and composer Konstantin Heuer, who set to music the poem “Die Liebe” by Else Lasker-Schüler which each of the competitors will be asked to perform. The round table discussion, in which the audience is invited to participate, will be chaired by Professor Ulrich Konrad of the University of Würzburg’s Department of Musicology. The specialist for the European music of the 17th to 20th centuries argues that singing should be seen from various historical and aesthetic perspectives as something “fundamentally human”. Discussion at the matinée will also consider what it means in the present day to sing or to expose oneself to song.
More than the sum of its musical parts
“Song exemplifies an elementary idea of intimate music-making”, explains Professor Konrad. The varied structure and content of typically versified spoken texts and their musical form fruitfully complement each other, usually at the piano. And the fascination continues: “For over 200 years, composers, singers and pianists have accepted the challenge of eliciting something more from a song than its words and notes alone, something which is ideally “more than just the sum of its parts” as the musicologist puts it. Still relevant today: the contemporaneity of a song always involves engaging with a way of feeling, thinking and expression which belongs to the period in which the song was written.
As the lied - this highly complex and sensitive genre - has no simple presence in this sense, it must be created afresh again and again, almost given a new life every time it is sung. “Singing is primarily a matter of breathing”, clarifies Professor Konrad. The DEBUT singing competition, which was initiated in 2002 by Dr. Manfred Wittenstein, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of WITTENSTEIN SE, has encouraged young singers to embrace a highly idiosyncratic artistic task. At the same time, the audience becomes aware of the expressive power of the art song form. “This is not so much a case of entertainment as of a means of living itself”, emphasises the Chairman of the Academy for Mozart Research at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
- All information about the competition is available at http://www.debut.de/en/
- Tickets (€10) now on sale in the Haus des Gastes in Kurpark Bad Mergentheim (Tel. 07931/965-225) or at the box office on the day
