Page 105 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

Benjamin Appl, you moved to London in 2010 for professional
reasons. There is still today, at least officially, your residence. So

you left your homeland at that time. What was different in
England than in Germany? What worked there that you couldn't
have easily achieved here?

Benjamin Appl: London, also New York, but London in
particular, was and is a great place for the song. I think the
reasons are that during the time of National Socialism a lot of
people went to England - to London. There were many great

singing teachers at that time who came from Germany.
Pianists, Paul Hamberger, for example, singers - it was simply
a place where culture gathered. Actually, exactly what the

Nazis did not want. That these art forms or this music became
international. As a result of this emigration, a huge wave of
German music or German composers was performed
everywhere. And so, for example, there is also this wonderful

story that a singer says Schubert songs and Schumann songs
in the evening at the National Gallery in London when the
German Luftwaffe bombed London at the same time. Or when

Fischer-Dieskau saw in Carnegie Hall that the people, the
Jewish emigrants, sat in the front rows and spoke every text. I
believe that the seeds were really planted in London for a very
great tradition not only of the German song, but also of the