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Silenced – Unsung Voices of the 20th Century. Ian Koziara, tenor. Bradley Moore, piano. Cedille CDR 90000 231. Total time: 68:00.
PERSPECTIVE — One of the pleasures of the classical-music realm in recent decades has been the rediscovery of music suppressed by the Third Reich. Entartete, or “degenerate,” music, as it came to be called, involved the output of composers who were deemed verboten due to their ethnicity or music that was simply unable to emerge given the realities of the era. A number of these under-performed works have enjoyed the light of day thanks to the efforts of Decca and Cedille Records and the championship of conductor James Conlon with his series on EMI and in concert with the orchestras of Cologne and San Francisco, and at Juilliard.
Cedille has now brought us Silenced – Unsung Voices of the 20th Century, an exploration of the woefully under-recorded song literature of Austrian composers Franz Schreker and Alexander von Zemlinsky, Silesian-born Viktor Ullmann, and, most intriguingly, Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová — all beautifully performed by tenor Ian Koziara and pianist Bradley Moore. The recording was in part financed by Chicago resident Eva Fischell-Lichtenberg (who fled on foot with her parents from the Nazi-occupied Czech Republic in 1938) and her husband Arnold Tobin, who have dedicated their donation in memory of Eva’s family.
Koziara is a familiar presence on operatic stages, particularly in the Slavic and Jugendliche Wagnerian repertoire, and as Mozart’s Idomeneo. “I proudly proclaim that I am now probably the third world call for Idomeneo,” he jokes, “and I am more than happy to be number three!” A Chicagoland native, he sang with the Anima Children’s Chorus as a youth. Following vocal study at Lawrence University and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, he became James Levine’s final hire for the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera, making his debut there in The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. He recently essayed his first Froh in Das Rheingold in Munich and is set for Parsifal in Frankfurt in the 2025-26 season.
The disc opens with a deeply felt account of the Fünf Lieder, Op. 4, by Schreker, a composer who has been pivotal for the tenor. “My first gig after Lindemann was the main tenor role in Der ferne Klang, in Frankfurt,” he says. “I was surprised to learn that Schreker was the second-most important opera composer in the German-speaking world in the early 20th century. I fell into a rabbit hole learning about 20th-century composers who found themselves marginalized due to the events of the Second World War.”
Happily, Silenced goes some distance in demonstrating the reasons for Koziara’s rise to prominence. The voice as caught here is ample, golden-toned, and deployed with great interpretive intelligence. Koziara is as concerned with technique as anyone but is not afraid to occasionally sacrifice vocal perfection for expressive purposes. He says he tries to find one or two moments when he can “sing as big as I can but also come off the voice once in a while and give a real whisper. Yes, these are sins, but they are sins that cost so little and add so much!”
For many listeners, the meltingly beautiful vocal writing of Kaprálová will be the disc’s most treasurable discovery, particularly in Koziara’s responsive handling of her Opus 2 songs, and the Op. 14 Sbohem a šáteček (waving farewell), which concludes the disc. Although Kaprálová was not of a group specifically targeted by the Reich, those circumstances undoubtedly led to her marginalization. Stranded in Paris, where her scholarship was revoked, Kaprálová was forced into squalid circumstances and died of typhoid fever at 25.
“Kaprálová was the most important line item for me,” Koziara says. “Something wonderful about her is a unique harmonic language that yet resides in a fairly conventional aesthetic. One who has never heard any Czech composer can listen to her and enjoy themselves. ‘Jitro’ will forever be a starting piece in my recitals. It is gorgeously written for piano, and for someone who died at 25, she had an unbelievably intuitive understanding of how voices work.”
The Wagnerian influence in this music is palpable for Koziara, most clearly in the Zemlinsky Fünf Gesänge, Op. 8. “So much of the harmonic language in these pieces gets its start in Wagner: the propensity for lots of diminished sevenths as pivot points for modulations, the increased chromaticism and willingness to move around. Zemlinsky most clearly demonstrates that influence. In many ways, he is the most conservative composer on the disc.”
Despite the devastating political environment that frames these pieces, one finds a moment of warming sunshine in Koziara’s affectionate delivery of Ullmann’s “Abendphantasie” from the Hölderlin-Lieder, composed in the concentration camp Theresienstadt days before the composer’s transfer to Auschwitz. “I have always been fascinated by people who are in extremely dark moments yet create incredibly sunny music. ‘Abendphantasie’ is so pleasant, this lovely scene in the countryside. I just want to live in it. I find moments like this transfixing.”
The contribution of pianist Bradley Moore cannot be overestimated in this project. From the rippling cadences of the Schreker through the militaristic rhythms of Zemlinsky’s Mit Trommeln und Pfeifen, Moore demonstrates a stylistic sensitivity and responsiveness to the singer that is second to none.
Cedille has done the project proud with a superbly mastered soundscape from engineer Bill Maylone and an attractive, trifold package with a separate booklet of texts and excellent program notes by Roger Pines.
“We deserve to understand this moment in music history, possibly the most fascinating period from around 1890 to 1940,” Koziara says. “There is the upheaval which caused the mainstreaming of some and the verbotening of others, a horror we still try to understand. But it is also here that we see the fracturing of classical and popular music.
“With this program, I am tracing four composers who I see as working in the classical vein just before things explode. It’s an important era for understanding our musical environment now, that we live in at this moment.”
