Selige Stunde

Jonas Kaufmann’s new album, “Selige Stunde” released by Sony Classical. During the corona lockdown he joined forces with pianist Helmut Deutsch to record a highly personal selection of lieder by Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler and other masters. “Selige Stunde” is the first album from this series of recording sessions. 

Sometimes bad things can bring along something good. Many people used the corona lockdown as a welcome opportunity to unwind. Jonas Kaufmann took advantage of it to do something he had relegated to the back burner in recent years: to record lieder songs. Together with Helmut Deutsch, his longstanding partner at the piano, he used the time between April and June to record a good many lieder dear to the hearts of this stellar German tenor and his veteran accompanist. 

The album, which takes its title from a lied by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Selige Stunde, or “An Hour of Bliss”), contains such popular items as Ännchen von Tharau, Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling (“Komm, lieber Mai”), Adelaide, Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Die Forelle, Mondnacht, Widmung, Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt and In mir klingt ein Lied. There are also a few rediscoveries, such as Zemlinsky’s Selige Stunde or Still wie die Nacht by Carl Bohm (1844–1920). 

Helmut Deutsch discovered Still wie die Nacht in an old lieder album of the sort found in many musical homes in the first half of the 20th century. The same applies to Franz Liszt’s Es muss ein Wunderbares sein. 
 
Love and longing are the prevailing themes and moods of “Selige Stunde”. But listeners will also find songs of farewell, inner withdrawal and tranquillity. Franz Schubert’s Wandrers Nachtlied II, Johannes Brahms’s Da unten im Tale, Hugo Wolf’s Verschwiegene Liebe and Verborgenheit, Richard Strauss’s Allerseelen and Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen fill a programme of wide-ranging variations on the theme of the “sensitive soul”, each fully characteristic of the composer concerned. 

Whether the sessions could take place at all was uncertain until a few hours before the initial rehearsals. Helmut Deutsch lives in Vienna: would he be allowed across the border? Only after a call from the border guards to Sony Classical was he permitted to enter Germany.  “We couldn’t go into the studio as originally planned, because it had to close on orders from the state”, recalls Jonas Kaufmann. “So the whole thing could only take place in private quarters. In the end, it proved to be a blessing in disguise, because something different comes out in private surroundings compared to a studio. You’re closer to the zeitgeist of these pieces, most of which were originally performed in more intimate settings, namely, in private circles, in so-called salons.” 

Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch have worked together for almost 30 years. They first met in 1991, when Kaufmann was still a student at Munich University of Music and Deutsch held a professorship there in lied performance. “It was Helmut who opened my ears and eyes to lieder”, Kaufmann confides. Over the years the teacher-pupil relationship turned into a musical partnership whose longevity and artistic evolution have been a windfall for music lovers everywhere.