auf Deutschby Austris Apenis
1. How did music first come into your life, and what is the earliest musical memory you still carry with you? What drew you to the horn in particular—was it love at first sound, or a slower discovery? Many musicians take a winding road into the profession. What did yours look like, and did any of the detours turn out to be valuable later?
My mother played the lute and often sang in the evenings with me and my brothers. Today the instrument lies on my grand piano. Song is my way into music. I grew up in modest circumstances in a small village, where there was little opportunity for musical development. My parents sang in the church choir, and there was a piano in the house. So I began playing the piano at the age of 7, and it remained my main instrument until I was 19. Besides the church choir, the village also had a brass choir in which I played trumpet. That is how it came about that after my school qualifying exams, I began studying school music in Mainz with piano as my principal subject and trumpet as my second.
I did not particularly like the trumpet's bright tone color, so right at the beginning of my studies I changed my second subject to the horn. The high register went well, but the low register was something I still had to discover. After two years, the low register was there but the high register was gone. I moved to the Hochschule in Cologne, still on the school music course, but now for two years with horn as my principal subject and piano as my second. Prof. Erich Penzel trained my high register, and my range was fundamentally in order.
While I was still completing my school music examinations, I auditioned at the Frankfurt Opera and won the position of second horn. Only then did I begin studying the horn more thoroughly…a somewhat unusual order of things. The school music course covers many subjects, and so I had a broad musical education and a good knowledge of the repertoire. The intensive piano study was helpful for my musical understanding as well.
2. Which teachers or mentors shaped you most, and what are the most important things from them that you still pass on today?
In technical terms, my training with Erich Penzel was formative, and I have assumed a great deal of it in my own teaching and developed it further.
In a course, Frøydes Ree Wekre recommended practicing certain technical matters—double tonguing or lip trills, for example—for 5 minutes every day; I have applied this constant repetition in what one might call homeopathic doses both for myself and in my teaching.
Musically there are a great many musicians from whom I have learned simply by listening, Fritz Wunderlich for example.
3. What did you learn from Fritz Wunderlich?
I adore his open, emotional and authentic way of singing.
4. When did you know that the horn was going to be your life?
As a school music student at the Hochschule in Cologne, I was taken seriously by the horn players studying horn as their principal subject only because I had a small car. So now and then I was allowed to play along in concerts because I could drive my colleagues there. That is how we came to travel to a concert at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart. It became clear to me in a flash that I wanted to be a horn player.
I was actually in the middle of my school music finals, but after I told Prof. Penzel of my decision, he sent me, just two weeks later, to the audition at the Frankfurt Opera, and so the decision was made.
5. What do you remember about your first years in an orchestra, and what did that time teach you that a soloist cannot learn anywhere else?
The first period at the Frankfurt Opera was very stressful as I had no routine and no orchestral experience at all. The repertoire was very large in those days, and in a single year I got to know more than 50 operas. It is precisely because of that first imprint that I still love the opera so much today. The mixture of orchestra, singing, staging, and acting is so interesting.
The following years as principal horn in Bamberg and in Frankfurt at the Hessischer Rundfunk were very challenging and fulfilling. What could be finer than playing the great solos of the Romantic concert repertoire. For me, playing in an orchestra was always a social experience as well. I was very glad to be part of a collective for those ten years, with all the positive and even the negative experiences.
Since I also wanted a family, I had to leave the orchestra—with a heavy heart—and be on the road more as a soloist and chamber musician. With the professorship in Frankfurt, I was able to arrange my time more flexibly.
6. What were your positive and negative experiences in orchestras?
I loved being part of a group, and I loved the repertoire. Sometimes I was not amused by conductors without vision, or by the unprofessional behavior of colleagues who came unprepared.
7. You entered the profession at a time when the orchestral world looked very different for women than it does today. How did you deal with that?
Yes, unfortunately I did once have the experience of not being invited to an audition, on the grounds that the horn section did not want to engage a woman. But in the orchestra, only the playing counted for me, and male dominance did not unsettle me since I grew up with 3 older brothers.
8. Competitions were part of your early career. What role do you think they play in a young musician's development, and what did they mean to you personally?
Competitions are always good for working up a broader repertoire. The performance situation is a challenge that trains focus, the ability to concentrate, and strength of nerve. So I can only recommend taking part in competitions, but always in the awareness that "the journey is the destination." The preparation not only improves your technique: you also have to arrive at a musical statement of your own and bring it onto the stage.
9. At some point you chose the life of a soloist and chamber musician over an orchestra chair. What goes into a decision like that, and what would you say to a young player who faces it today?
For a horn student, the path should lead into an orchestra first. Our repertoire in the solo and chamber music field is not broad enough to gather sufficient musical experience. There is a difference between listening to a Bruckner symphony and playing in one yourself—no value judgment intended—but they are different experiences.
My decision to leave the orchestra was a purely pragmatic one: solo work, chamber music, a professorship, and two children…after that there was unfortunately no time left for an orchestra. Much later, when my children were grown up, I became a member of the Capella Andrea Barca, an orchestra of Andras Schiff's, where I was able to play in wonderful concerts.
10. Several works have been written for you. What is it like to have a piece composed for you, and how does the relationship between performer and composer actually work in practice?
The composers I worked with were fascinated by the Romantic horn sound; the focus lay less on the technical side. Not many contemporary composers can realize the soulfulness in the sound of the horn.
11. What makes it difficult to incorporate the soulfulness of the horn in contemporary music?
That is a difficult question. One would first have to clarify the terminology, what soulfulness actually means. Beyond that, soulfulness only comes into being through the listener who perceives it. In contemporary music in particular, there are great differences in how each individual receives it.
12. György Ligeti's Hamburg Concerto is closely tied to your name. What would you like people to know about how it came about, and about what it was like to work with him?
With Ligeti, we were on concert tours several times with the trio, Saschko Gawrilow and P.L. Aimard. In that way, we spent some free time together, and I was able to convince him that it would be marvelous if he were to carry further the compositional use of the horn he had begun in the Trio for violin, piano, and horn.
During a visit to his Hamburg flat, he played me a recording of a Romanian alphorn that he had heard in his childhood. The natural harmonic series fascinated him, and in the Hamburg Concerto he used the horn without hand-stopping, as a pure natural horn. Through the use of four additional natural horns alongside the solo horn and their simultaneous use in different tunings, new sounds arose far removed from conventional harmony.
Working with Ligeti was impressive—he rang me up, for instance, to ask whether he could leap from the 13th overtone of the horn in D to the 7th of the horn in E. At that, I first had to take a deep breath and do some calculating.
13. Is there a piece or a composer you would still like to work with?
In Ligeti's estate, there are sketches for a further movement of the Hamburg Concerto. I would very much like to work on it with him, but sadly it is too late.
14. Your recordings include many works that were rarely heard before you played them. What guided those choices, and is there a recording you feel particularly close to?
I always found it highly interesting to look for new repertoire in libraries and other sources. It is also exciting to read the autographs of the standard concertos, to see what the composer actually wrote down. Very often the editors reworked the editions, altering articulation or even more.
15. How do you build your musical statement when preparing a solo piece? How does your experience as a pianist and musicologist influence that?
When at all possible, I first tried to look at the autograph. With classical concertos I also tried to apply the rules of the performance practice of the time as they are described in the methods of the period by Quantz, Leopold Mozart, and others.
16. Chamber music has been a constant in your life. What does playing in a trio or a small ensemble give you that playing with a symphony orchestra does not? Were there any musical partners who changed the way you play?
Chamber music demanded the greatest musical flexibility, above all in the piano dynamic. Reacting to one another musically, the willingness to compromise, and the mutual influence are essential and challenging. In the orchestra these questions also arise to some extent within the horn section, but because of the conducting, the possibilities for shaping the music are more limited.
17. What has changed most in the horn world since you began: the playing, the instruments, the audiences, or the players themselves?
Worldwide globalization has mixed a great deal together. Local characteristics such as the Viennese F horn have unfortunately become extremely rare. Horn students can obtain their training in many different places and carry that influence back to their home country, passing their knowledge on to students in turn. The professors at the German conservatories, for example, are also an international mixture, and they teach accordingly.
18. How would you describe the sound you are looking for when you pick up the horn, and has that ideal changed over the course of your career?
For me the horn sound should always be open and singing, in other words free. My sound ideal has become somewhat darker over the years.
19. The horn is a physically demanding instrument. What have you learned over a long career about looking after the body and the mind, and what do you wish you had known earlier?
Since body and mind are something very individual, I personally went through a process of development and kept searching for the perfect balance. With what I know today, I would like to start all over again—for example, once the embouchure is fundamentally in order across the range, it has an importance of 50-60%. The remaining percentage is body work.
20. You have taught for many years. What do you try to give your students beyond technique, and what have they given you in return?
I always wanted to convey joy and enthusiasm for this profession, and the awareness that a successful life as a musician goes together with a great deal of discipline. My students gave me their trust, and with it the opportunity to play a significant part in shaping their path.
21. Now that you are stepping back from some of your roles, what will you miss most, and what are you looking forward to?
In the poem “Stufen” (“Stages”) by Hermann Hesse, I particularly like the line, “We must pass through space after space with a cheerful heart, clinging to none as to a home....” Each stage of life brings something new; while I am grateful for my past career path, I am not wistful—instead, I look ahead and enjoy my new freedom.
