Songs of Longing – Jewish Voices between Exile and Renewal
On his new album, the award-winning baritone Äneas Humm, together with pianist Renate Rohlfing, presents a program that gains profound relevance under the theme of “Longing.” At its center stand the songs and life stories of four composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Erich Zeisl, and Henriëtte Bosmans. All of them were of Jewish heritage and were forced to flee Nazi Germany or live in fear for their lives during the Second World War.
The program not only reveals the cultural treasures that were lost to Europe through the ideological blindness of National Socialism, but also bears witness to the extraordinary diversity of song composition in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century and in the 1930s, complemented by four postwar songs from the Netherlands. This repertoire conveys the spirit of a time marked like no other by radical change and destruction, but also by hope, new beginnings, and the deep human longing for a better world.
