Heinz Marten

Heinz Marten (born January 17, 1908 in Schleswig ; † November 26, 1991 in Viersen ) was a German singer ( tenor ). For decades he was considered one of the best German oratorios tenors and lieder singers.

Life

Heinz Marten grew up in Schleswig . The parents (the father was a cabinet maker ) sang in a choir to care for Low German songs, and so the son learned to sing at an early age as a member of the Schleswig Cathedral Choir. After leaving school with secondary school leaving certificate, the father demanded that his son learn a safe (“sensible”) profession first. Like his father, Heinz Marten became a cabinet maker. When he had created a professional basis through the journeyman's examination, and after several teachers had carefully tested the voice and musicality of the eighteen-year-old and assessed it positively, he began to study singing in Berlin. This gave him a comprehensive, not just musical, general education in a short time. His most important singing teachers were Albert Fischer and Oskar Rees and, as a great role model in recitative singing, Hermann Schey .

Heinz Marten soon went public. At Christmas 1927 he sang in the Schleswig Cathedral, shortly afterwards he made his debut in the same place in Handel's “ Messiah ”. In 1929 he first appeared in public in Berlin, in the concert hall and on the radio. Since 1931 he taught, appointed by its founder Gerhard Schwarz , at the Spandau church music school , which he gave up three years later because of his many engagements. He sang, also in smaller concert appearances, initially in places mainly in northern and central Germany. The breakthrough came with Heinz Martens' first recital at the Singakademie zu Berlin , his official debut as a lieder singer. The press was impressed and exuberant (January 1937). A year later, Marten was awarded the City of Berlin Music Prize, one of the few awards in Germany at the time that could be viewed as apolitical.

Heinz Marten's career was interrupted by the start of the Second World War. In 1944 Marten was drafted into "auxiliary services".

After an almost two-year break, Heinz Marten began to build up a new existence in autumn 1945 - again from Schleswig. Since longer journeys were almost impossible, the radius of his activities was initially small and only grew slowly. Since orchestras had to be put together again, the number of recitals and smaller church music initially dominated. Only slowly did a new career develop for him, initially in northern and western Germany, and later in the south as well. Marten had lived in Bielefeld from 1950 and moved to Cologne in 1955 . Here he held a teaching position at the music college until his retirement in 1973 , since 1957 as a professor of his own singing class.

As a teacher, Heinz Marten continued to take care of his students with great dedication even in his retirement and taught with great pleasure both in his last years in Cologne and in Viersen, where he found his retirement home in 1976, until September 1991. He died of a stroke on November 26, 1991 and was buried on December 2 in the Viersen municipal cemetery.

Act

Heinz Marten performed all over Germany, not only in Berlin , where he lived until 1945, but in cities such as Danzig , Königsberg , Freiburg im Breisgau , Tübingen , Flensburg , Kiel , Nuremberg , Munich , Aachen , Cologne , Leipzig , Dresden , Bremen , Lübeck , Breslau and Gleiwitz . He has also made successful guest appearances abroad, in Switzerland and the Netherlands , in Brussels , Paris , Linz , Vienna , Prague and Florence .

Hardly any recordings were made with him, so that his name is little known today.

repertoire

In the course of a two-part singing life (1927–1943 and 1945–1962), Heinz Marten sang an extensive repertoire. He performed in about 1,800 concerts. Marten designed Bach's St. Matthew Passion alone 270 times as an evangelist and often as an aria singer . The Johannes Passion , the Magnificat and the great oratorios by Handel and Haydn , the church works by Mozart , Ludwig van Beethoven , Schubert and Anton Bruckner formed the focus of his work. His repertoire also included rarely performed works by Claudio Monteverdi , Heinrich Schütz and Antonio Vivaldi , by Hector Berlioz , Hans Pfitzner , Armin Knab , Kurt Thomas , Mátyás Seiber , Kurt Hessenberg , Johannes Driessler and others. The lied repertoire found its focus with Schubert, Schumann , Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf .

Heinz Marten sang opera arias mainly by Handel and Mozart . In 1952 he sang Belmonte in Mozart's “ Die Entführung aus dem Serail ” nine times in Bielefeld . 1955 and later in concert performances of Carl Orff's Monteverdi adaptation of L'Orfeo .

Marten has sung under numerous well-known conductors such as Hermann Abendroth , Heinrich Hollreiser , Oswald Kabasta , Herbert von Karajan , Hans Knappertsbusch , Joseph Keilberth , Hans Klotz , Fritz Lehmann , Ferdinand Leitner , Hans Pfitzner , Günther Ramin , Hans Rosbaud , Hellmut Schnackenburg , Carl Schuricht , Karl Straube , Kurt Thomas , Günter Wand and Hans Weisbach .

Heinz Martens most important song accompanists for three decades were Rolf Albes and Hans-Martin Theopold .

literature

• Franz Schubert: The beautiful miller. Heinz Marten (tenor), Rolf Albes (piano). CD and booklet. [TMK 0105]
• Wilfried Brennecke: Heinz Marten in memoriam.
• Wilfried Brennecke: Excerpts from a singer's biography in: Pressestimmen. International Bach Academy Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1992.

Web links

• Works by and about Heinz Marten in the catalog of the German National Library