His life accidentally cut short days before his thirty-sixth birthday, the tenor Fritz Wunderlich is cemented in memory as an incomparable interpreter of Mozart and Schubert. In a dazzling manner, this album shows how incomplete Wunderlich’s reputation is and how, since his early days, he was an extraordinary interpreter of the music of his time. Recorded by the south German radios between 1956 and 1960, the works presented here originate from a group of musicians that were ignored and reviled by the Nazi regime but remained present in the country against all odds.
Such is the case of Günter Raphael, the choirmaster and organist at St. Thomas Leipzig, who lost his job in 1934 after being classed “half-Jew” by the authorities. Well-liked in the post-war GDR, he possessed a distinct sense of humor shown in Sonate Palmström in which he musicalized the absurd poems of Christian Morgenstern and combined a variety of elements such as jazz, pop music and cabaret. A pioneer in Germany of baroque music played on period instruments, Fritz Neumeyer composed for his friend Wunderlich a delectable neo-classical suite of Studentenlieder (“Student Songs”) based on humorous texts from the 17th Century that the tenor interprets with his usual enthusiasm.
This passionate publication also provides extracts of operas and sung lieders as well as the diverse ensembles of Dietrich von Bausznern, a friend and classmate of Fritz Wunderlich, Everett Helm, Heinrich Feischner, Hans Pfitzner, Hermann Reutter, Alban Bery (Wozzeck) and Carl Orff, to which the editors have added an air of Stavinski’s oratorio Oedopus Rex. These superbly restored recordings offer a dive into a mysterious, post-war German universe while presenting another side of an artist we thought we already knew well. © François Hudry/Qobuz