Rudolf shock

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Rudolf Schock (born September 4, 1915 in Duisburg , † November 13, 1986 in Düren ) was a German opera, lied and operetta singer with a lyrical tenor voice .

Beginnings

Rudolf Schock grew up in a working-class family in Duisburg-Wanheimerort and sang in the family and in various choirs from childhood. After the early death of their father in 1923, he and his four siblings, who later all became professional singers, financially supported the mother, who worked at the Duisburg City Theater, by performing folk songs and operetta melodies at festivals and pubs.

As an amateur, Rudolf Schock was accepted into the opera choir of the Duisburg City Theater together with his sister Elfriede in 1932 , where he was soon allowed to take on small solo roles after he had started singing studies with Gustav Pilken in Cologne.

In 1936 he was accepted into the Bayreuth Festival choir as the first chorister . This can be seen as the actual beginning of his career. In Bayreuth he met, among others, the heroic tenor Laurenz Hofer , who became his teacher and who looked after him until the 1950s.

In 1937 he received his first soloist contract with the State Theater in Braunschweig . There he met the dancer Gisela Behrends (1917–2011), whom he married in 1940. The couple, who were only separated after Rudolf Schock's death, had two daughters, Isolde (1941–1983) and Dagmar (* 1945).

Rudolf Schock soon also received evening contracts from the Vienna State Opera and the Berlin Municipal Opera (today: Deutsche Oper Berlin ). However, his career was interrupted in 1939 by the Second World War, as he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and - apart from small breaks for appearances in Vienna and Berlin - had to remain a soldier until the end of the war in 1945. After the war, he first earned a living for his family as a farm worker in the Harz Mountains, but then returned to the opera stage and the concert hall on the advice of the director of the Hanover Opera House .

The career

In 1946 the legendary English producer Walter Legge heard Rudolf Schock at a performance of Bedřich Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride in Hanover . He then got his first record deal and made countless recordings for EMI (Electrola) between 1947 and 1961. In 1962 his German producer Fritz Ganss took over the newly founded classical music department of ARIOLA-Sonopress, whereupon Schock also changed the label and then recorded for Eurodisc until 1983.

In 1948, Rudolf Schock was the first German singer to be brought to the Covent Garden Opera in London after the war . In the course of his career he has performed in Berlin and Vienna, at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein (Düsseldorf / Duisburg), in Hamburg , Munich , at the Salzburg Festival and the Edinburgh Festival. In 1949 he went on tour in Australia with the program that had been planned for Richard Tauber , who had died in 1948 . He also performed in America, the Netherlands and Belgium . A highlight of his career was his involvement as Stolzing in the Bayreuth performance of the Meistersinger in 1959.

Schock achieved particular popularity in German-speaking countries through his participation in several music films, such as You are the world for me (1953), The happy wanderer (1955) or The Dreimäderlhaus (1958).

For his artistic achievements, he was appointed chamber singer in Vienna in 1954 , and in 1961 he was awarded the Golden Electrola Ring. He was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class and the Great Cross of Merit for his services to the spread of so-called serious music . He was also the recipient of the Robert Stolz Foundation Prize and the Hermann Löns Medal in gold. His hometown Duisburg honored him with the Mercator plaque and named a street after him after his death. The city of Düren , where he spent the last years of his life, gave the square in front of the “House of the City” his name in 1992.

The 1960s and after

After an extraordinarily successful opera career of a quarter of a century only interrupted by the war years, the almost 50-year-old Rudolf Schock gradually reduced his career at the major opera houses. In his recordings he turned more to the classical song, the operetta and the folk / homeland song. “He did not abdicate. He just changed the throne ”(Klaus Geitel).

Rudolf Schock's excursions into popular music were chalked up as betrayal of his actual calling. He himself emphasized again and again that this did not harm his work as an opera and lieder singer, but on the contrary made many new friends through performances with folk music of serious music.

Schock went to the studio with composers Robert Stolz , Nico Dostal , Gerhard Winkler , Peter Kreuder , Franz Grothe , Werner Eisbrenner and Fried Walter for recordings in the field of operetta and light music . Even Werner Schmidt-Boelcke made numerous recordings with him while Willi Boskovsky stood by the Holland-tours frequently conducting.

After 1962 he appeared often as a guest on smaller opera stages and a lot in concert halls (in German-speaking countries, in Belgium, the Netherlands, America and Canada). The programs included classical songs, fragments from oratorios, but also opera arias and operetta songs. At song recitals, Adolf Stauch, Iván Eröd and Hellmut Hideghéti were mostly his piano partners. He often performed with German choirs in mixed programs and in 1980 completed a tour of the United States with the Germania Siegburg choir community .

He greatly expanded his television presence and those who admired him in the cinema became “his TV community with millions of people” (Torsten Schmidt), which remained loyal to him for a second quarter of a century. At that time, shock appeared in the still young medium of television in opera and operetta adaptations and in countless entertainment programs. In 1967 he received the silver screen and in 1970 the gold screen . In 1968 he was awarded a gold record with diamonds, in 1979 a gold record for the album The Voice for Millions .

He recovered well from a heart attack in 1969 and immediately resumed his extensive work on the stage, in the concert hall, in the recording and television studio. He gave his last concert on November 9, 1986 with the Constantia 1869 choir in Düren-Birkesdorf.

On November 13, 1986 Rudolf Schock died of heart failure in his home in Düren. His grave is in the Düren-Gürzenich cemetery .

After his death

Since 2000 the opera singer Rudolf Schock has come to the fore again. EMI / Warner has since re-released its entire opera repertoire with the tenor in various editions on CD and the later complete recordings and opera cross-sections for Ariola-Eurodisc have since been re-released by Sony Classical. Smaller producers (for example Relief and Walhall) made the complete radio opera recordings with Rudolf Schock from the 1950s available to a partly renewed opera audience. The result is that nowadays the growing recognition of his artistic merits not only makes it easier for the admirers of Schocks to “protect him from quick criticism and superficial classification” ( Gerald Köhler , University of Cologne).

Filmography

Sound recordings (selection)

literature

  • Rudolf Schock: Wanderlieder. Howdy God all together. Voggenreiter, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1975, ISBN 3-8024-0044-5 - Songs and stories from hiking, collected and edited by Rudolf Schock.
  • Rudolf Schock in collaboration with Rolf Ulrici : Oh, I have in my heart . FA Herbig, Munich and Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-7766-1363-7 - autobiography.
  • Ralf Krüger: Our life for shock. A cheerful family novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-4991-5750-0 - Rudolf Schock as the dominant family idol of a Berlin family from the post-war period to the 1980s.
  • Charlotte Hofmann-Hege : Every day is not a Sunday - The secret of Rudolf Schock and the castle maid . Salzer, Heilbronn 1991, ISBN 3-7936-0299-0 - An elderly castle maid sends roses to the tenor at every concert and is attended by him.
  • Barbara Boisits: shock, Rudolf. In: Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon . Online edition, Vienna 2002 ff., ISBN 3-7001-3077-5 ; Print edition: Volume 4, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-7001-3046-5 .
  • Rudolf Schock & the Roelens: the tenor and the young lady . Catalog for the exhibition of the theater studies collection of the University of Cologne, Schloss Wahn. With contributions by Elmar Buck, Gerald Köhler and Torsten Schmidt. Theater studies collection, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-931691-40-3 .
  • Daniel Hirschel:  shock, Rudolf Johann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 351 f. ( Digitized version ).

swell

  1. ^ Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: On and Off the Record . Faber, London 1982, ISBN 978-0-571-11928-8 , pp. 62 .
  2. ↑ Rudolf Schock - Not these tones. In: Der Spiegel from November 28, 1962.
  3. ↑ Rudolf Schock with the Germania Siegburg Choir Association to America. In: RudolfSchock.nl. Retrieved December 12, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Awards: DE
  5. ^ The last concert by Rudolf Schock. Retrieved July 10, 2017 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Shock, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German opera, lied and operetta singer (lyric tenor)
DATE OF BIRTH September 4, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Duisburg
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1986
Place of death Düren