Baritone Hermann Prey, one of the greatest masters of the German Lied, celebrates his sixtieth birthday on July 11. Yet, at a time of life when many artists consider gracious retirement, Prey is full to the brim with new ideas, new projects, and new enthusiasms. Franz Schubert is central to most of them, and it is probably to Schubert and his more than eight hundred songs that Prey owes much of his youthful vigor.
"No other composer offers the variety that Schubert does," the singer commented to me in a recent interview. "Any other composer seems limited by comparison; you hear a minute or so of music, and you know right away who it is. But with Schubert you hear someone who is always growing, always developing.
"When I was a student, I used to think that Schubert was too simple; like everyone else at the time, I admired the great Romantics, such as Brahms and Wolf, who seemed more intellectual. It took a while to appreciate Schubert's wonderful simplicity and economy. He can do things with a single note, a single change of chord, that take other composers five or six times as long."
Prey likes to tell of singing the Schubert song cycle Winterreise (Winter's journey) at a concert in Nice, France, some years ago, when the late Marc Chagall was in the audience. "He came up to me after the concert," recalls Prey, "obviously very moved by the music. 'Monsieur Prey,' he said, in his polyglot mix of languages, 'Beethoven und Mozart sind Genie, aber Schubert ist ein Wunder.'" (Beethoven and Mozart are geniuses, but Schubert is a wonder.)
Prey's association with Schubert began relatively late in life, after he had already established a global reputation as an outstanding opera singer. Earlier, he attended the famous Berlin Music Academy and first attracted attention at a competition organized by the state radio. This led to his debut at the opera in Wiesbaden at the age of twenty-two; his success there was so phenomenal that the following year he was engaged as a leading baritone at the prestigious Hamburg Opera.
Opera Roles
Opera continued to dominate his life for the next twenty-five years or so, during which he appeared in leading roles at all the world's major houses. By 1957, he had debuted at the Vienna State Opera, arguably the finest in the world, and one to which he regularly returns. The Bavarian State Opera was next, beginning a thirty-year association with that famous ensemble. "Just last year I went with the Bavarians to Japan," Prey recalled to me. "We were a huge group; five complete productions--singers, dancers, orchestra, sets and designers and technicians and engineers of all kinds--more than five hundred people in all. It was a mammoth project, underwritten by a corporate consortium. But the money they pledged wasn't even needed at the end. You know, almost every seat was sold within a few days of the opening announcement. And those tickets were priced at about $300. Each!"
Certain roles have become associated with Prey, so much so that it is hard to imagine anyone else performing them. His interpretation of Wolfram in Tannhauser is a classic; another Wagnerian role on which he has put his stamp is that of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. He has regularly taken both of those roles at New York's Metropolitan
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