Marcel Cordes

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Marcel Cordes (around 1960)

Marcel Cordes (born March 11, 1920 in Stelzenberg as Kurt Schumacher , † November 26, 1992 in Angerberg ) was a German opera and concert singer ( baritone ). In the 1950s / 60s he and Josef Metternich had an almost unique position in the subject of the Italian and especially the Verdi baritone of German origin.

Life

Cordes discovered his voice and his playfulness early on. At the age of 16 he went to the Kaiserslautern Conservatory , three years later as a scholarship holder at the Mannheim University of Music , wavering for a long time between tenor and baritone voices. As a soldier he was obliged to stage appearances at the German-speaking city theater in Eger in 1941, where he made his debut as a baritone: as Count Luna in The Troubadour by Giuseppe Verdi and as Count Liebenau in The Armourer by Albert Lortzing . After his return from war and captivity, he debuted in 1947 again on Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern , now as a tenor with the role of Canio in Pagliacci by Ruggiero Leoncavallo . The success established a permanent engagement at the same house as the presumably upcoming tenore drammatico . In 1949 an engagement as a tenor at the Nationaltheater Mannheim followed . There Cordes was mainly used in high-lying lyric tenor roles, which, however, overstrained his natural means in the long run. Cordes then re-studied with the famous tenor Fritz Krauss and acquired a basic repertoire of baritone roles. He sang with them at the Karlsruhe State Theater in 1951 , where he was immediately engaged. On the advice of the artistic director, he adopted a stage name for his further career. As Marcel Cordes he made his third debut as Wolfram von Eschenbach in Tannhäuser by Richard Wagner. He quickly became a protagonist and crowd favorite. A stage career developed quickly, which took him as a guest to leading German-speaking opera houses, concert halls and radio stations.

In 1954 he was committed to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich . He received guest contracts at the opera houses in Berlin , Cologne , Stuttgart , Zurich , and finally at the Vienna Volksoper . He also made guest appearances at music stages across Europe. He has also performed in orchestral and radio concerts, song recitals and oratorios, and has taken on new roles in all kinds of genres and subjects.

In 1956 Cordes was appointed Bavarian Chamber Singer . From 1956 he also made records and took part in recitals and complete recordings. In 1957 he was unable to accept a call to the Metropolitan Opera in New York due to scheduling issues. In December 1957 he was the Ford in Berlin for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's sensational Falstaff debut . From 1962 to 1964 he also appeared at the Bayreuth Festival .

Cordes has worked on radio recordings and TV productions, made music with pianists such as Michael Raucheisen , conductors such as Hans Knappertsbusch , Karl Böhm , Rudolf Kempe , Ferenc Fricsay , Eugen Jochum , Ferdinand Leitner , Joseph Keilberth and Rafael Kubelík and played under directors such as Carl Ebert , Oscar Fritz Schuh , Günther Rennert , Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Otto Schenk .

Cordes was diagnosed with diabetes in the mid-1960s . Nevertheless, he continued to perform with new operatic roles in Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber , in Die Räuber by Giuseppe Verdi, in Pique Dame by Peter Tschaikowsky, in Der Evangelimann by Wilhelm Kienzl , in The Spanish Hour by Maurice Ravel , in Il campiello by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and in Die tote Stadt by Erich Wolfgang Korngold .

When he was just 50, he retired from the stage. He spent the following years on his country estate in Tyrol and died there at the age of 72. A singing grant “In memoriam Marcel Cordes” to the Tyrolean Academia Vocalis is dedicated to his memory.

repertoire

In addition to his Verdi roles, Marcel Cordes offered a broad, heterogeneous range of roles that identified him as the tragedy and comedian par excellence on the music stage, while at the same time demonstrating his almost limitless sense of style in a wide variety of tasks: with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Luigi Cherubini , Gioacchino Rossini , Gaetano Donizetti , Albert Lortzing, Otto Nicolai , Ambroise Thomas , Jacques Offenbach , Richard Wagner, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni , Giacomo Puccini , Umberto Giordano , Bedřich Smetana , Modest Mussorgski , Peter Tschaikowsky , Engelbert Humperdinck and Richard Strauss - up to composers and works by Modern.

Cordes was also a concert singer valued by leading conductors who, in addition to the solos in oratorios by Johann Sebastian Bach , Georg Friedrich Handel , Joseph Haydn , Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Johannes Brahms, performed orchestral songs and cycles by less popular composers, such as Franz Liszt , Gustav Mahler , Béla Bartók , Leoš Janáček , Richard Strauss, Joseph Haas , Winfried Zillig and Alois Melichar . He has also emerged as a lieder singer, again often with works by missing or little-known composers. But he achieved his dominant importance as a singer-mime with the mediation of extreme tragic, dramatic and bizarre, comedic characters. Cordes was a character actor on the musical stage with the qualities and skills of a great vocalist.

meaning

Marcel Cordes is primarily remembered as a German-speaking interpreter of Italian opera. In addition, he was internationally active as a lyricist, as a cavalier baritone and as a character baritone in works and roles in the German, French and Slavonic disciplines. He was also a leading singer of late romantic music and opera of the 20th century, and was considered to be of scale in works by Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner , Igor Stravinsky , Béla Bartók, Carl Orff , Werner Egk and others. His repertoire ranged from Mozart to German game opera, bel canto, Wagner and verismo to modern times. At the center of his stage activity were dramatic figures in operas by Giuseppe Verdi, such as Rigoletto, Count Luna, Giorgio Germont, Nabucco, Renato, Posa, Simone Boccanegra, Don Carlo di Vargas and Ford.

As a result of the relocation of the record business to World Wide Music Marketing and the structural changes in the German-European music scene, the audio files and thus the singer's name and personality have almost been forgotten since the 1980s. For a long time Cordes was only known to opera connoisseurs. It was not until the flood of inexpensive, newly marketed radio productions and a large CD edition in 2009 that the memory of his art and personality was revitalized.

Discography

  • CD Edition Marcel Cordes - 12 CDs in 4 boxes / Volume 1: Giuseppe Verdi, Volume 2: Belcanto & Verismo, Volume 3: German and European Opera, Volume 4: Concert, Lied, Modern / Hamburg Archive for Singing Art
  • CD: "Documents of a Singing Career", Preiser Records

literature

  • Jürgen Kesting: “Two German Italians” - Josef Metternich and Marcel Cordes. In: The great singers. Econ 1993
  • Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Fourth, expanded edition. KG Saur, Munich 2003. Volume 2: Castori – Frampoli, p. 900

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Cordes, Marcel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schumacher, Kurt (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera and concert singer (baritone)
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Stelzenberg , district of Kaiserslautern
DATE OF DEATH November 26, 1992
Place of death Angerberg , Tyrol