Heinrich Schlusnus

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Heinrich Schlusnus

Heinrich Schlusnus (born August 6, 1888 in Braubach , † June 18, 1952 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German opera and concert singer ( baritone ).

Life

Heinrich Schlusnus was the youngest of seven children. His father August Schlusnus came from Masuria . As a former sergeant and employee of the railway administration, he had been transferred to the Rhineland. His mother Anna Schlusnus geb. Adam came from the Westerwald . Even as a child, Heinrich Schlusnus showed himself to be very musical, played the harmonica and already stood out as a student at the secondary school in Oberlahnstein with an unusually large vocal range. For the time being, however, he was denied vocal training because the family's financial resources were insufficient.

After his father died, Heinrich Schlusnus left school at the age of 16 with the secondary school leaving certificate and began an apprenticeship in the imperial postal service on March 27, 1905, where he was assigned to the Koblenz telegraph office. In April 1906 he came to Kaisersesch in the Eifel for a short time , where he lived in the post office and worked day and night in the switchboard. On April 29, 1906, the Oberpostdirektion in Koblenz received a telegram from Kaiseresch with the following words: “The local postal worker, Schlusnus, has disappeared without a trace since this morning around 6 o'clock I no longer enjoy the post office, he would go out into the world. ” He returned home driven by homesickness, but where his misstep was quickly ironed out and he got a new job at the post office. His next stations were first in Winningen , then Zell , St. Goar and finally Bendorf , where he passed his postal assistant examination on May 19, 1909. He then worked in Kastellaun before moving to Frankfurt in 1910.

In Frankfurt he received singing lessons from the singing teacher Welling and gave his first concert in 1912. After brief participation in the First World War , he was wounded on the Belgian front in August 1914. After returning to Germany, he decided to pursue a career as an opera singer, and made his debut in Hamburg in 1915 as Heerrufer in Lohengrin . He then worked at the city theater in Nuremberg and worked at the Berlin State Opera from 1917 until the theater was closed due to the war on September 1, 1944 . As part of the Verdi Renaissance of the 1920s, he sang there in the premiere of the Sicilian Vespers in 1932 . In April 1918 he gave his first recital in Berlin , which was to be followed by more than 2,000 more evenings. Schlusnus performed in Chicago , at the Bayreuth Festival and in South Africa , among others . His best-known roles were Wolfram in Tannhäuser , the title role in Rigoletto and Giorgio Germont in La traviata . He was internationally successful as a song interpreter, his constant accompanists at the piano were Felix Günther (who emigrated to America before the Second World War), Michael Raucheisen , Franz Rupp (1927 to 1934), Sebastian Peschko (1934–1950), Paul Zoll and Otto Braun (1950-1951).

The year 1919 was of fundamental importance, when the already successful singer started all over again under the singing teacher Louis Bachner. Once in his youth, Schlusnus had the instinct for free and unaffected natural singing, which had been buried during his apprenticeship in Frankfurt. At that time the voice became throaty, dark and unfree in tone due to the popular so-called "covering". The Bachner method peeled out the valid timbre, and the voice was given an effortless and radiant high. So Schlusnus could just sing as one speaks, naturally and clearly, so that printed program texts were actually superfluous. Bachner: “Sing with interest, not with the capital.” Conclusion: “[He] gave me the freedom of voice, my vocal technique and the understanding of correct singing. I owe him what I am. "

Schlusnus was a globally respected singer who was initially reluctant to adapt to the National Socialist system. In 1933, for example, he took the Jewish conductor Berthold Sander († November 1943 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ), who had been released in Hildesheim, into his Zehlendorf apartment and sang songs by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Gustav Mahler on January 26, 1934 on a radio broadcast . Nonetheless, he appeared at Hermann Göring's wedding in 1935 and advertised Adolf Hitler on March 29, 1936 . In 1938 he was appointed Reich Culture Senator , and in 1943 he received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science . In the final phase of the Second World War , Hitler included him in the God-gifted list of the most important artists in August 1944 , which freed him from military service, including on the home front .

In 1945, Schlusnus was initially on the black list of the US military government, but was denazified by the Chamber in Frankfurt am Main on August 28, 1947 as "not affected" . In the post-war period he worked in the provisional venue of the Frankfurt Opera , where he last appeared as Rigoletto in 1948. In 1951 he appeared again at the Koblenz Theater as Giorgio Germont in La Traviata and gave his last recital in the same year.

Heinrich Schlusnus died a year later in Frankfurt am Main. He was buried in his birthplace Braubach. The burial site there still exists today. In 1977 was in Berlin-Neukölln high-top settlement , the Heinrich-Schlusnus street named after the artist.

Schlusnus was considered to be “the most important German song interpreter of his generation”, an “excellent Verdi interpreter” and a “song singer of the highest artistic rank”. He participated in various complete opera recordings based on radio productions, but released on LP as early as the 1950s: including in La Traviata (1942), Rigoletto (1944), Tannhäuser (1949) and in the Sicilian Vespers (1951).

Schlusnus was married to the soprano Annemarie Emilie Helene Frieda born on July 31, 1933. Kuhl ( Annemay ), the former wife of his teacher Louis Bachner, with whom he also sang in duets and published records.

Discography (selection)

Fonts

  • Heinrich Schlusnus: Chats about Heinrich Schlusnus. Self-published, Berlin 1935.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German stage yearbook 1953. Theater history year and address book. 61st year. Berlin, p. 84.
  2. ↑ Michael Stoll: When Heinrich Schlusnus fled. In: Rhein-Zeitung. No. 248 of October 25, 2013, p. 22.
  3. ^ A b c d Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945. CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, pp. 6161–6162.
  4. ↑ E. v. Naso: Heinrich Schlusnus. Hamburg 1957, p. 71.
  5. ↑ E. v. Naso: Heinrich Schlusnus . Hamburg 1957, p. 74.
  6. ↑ E. v. Naso: Heinrich Schlusnus . Hamburg 1957, pp. 42-44.
  7. ^ A b Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 527, bearing in mind that Göring was his chief employer at the Berlin State Opera.
  8. ^ Fred K. Prieberg: Handbook of German Musicians. P. 6.163.
  9. ^ Info page graves of Klaus Nerger, Wiesbaden, accessed on January 21, 2010.
  10. ↑ a b Quotations and information from: KJ Kutsch, Leo Riemers: Großes Sängerlexikon. CD-Rom, entry on Heinrich Schlusnus, no page number.
  11. ↑ E. v. Naso: Heinrich Schlusnus . Hamburg 1957, p. 66.
  12. ^ Marion Brück:  Schlusnus, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 117 f. ( Digitized version ).
  13. ↑ Photo of the married couple Heinrich and Annemarie Schlusnus around 1950 at pinterest.de
personal data
SURNAME In the end, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera and concert singer (baritone)
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Braubach
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1952
Place of death Frankfurt am Main