Writings and lectures about Alfred Wolfsohn and his theories
Alfred Wolfsohn's own writings
Audio CDs of Alfred Wolfsohn's work and ideas with vocal demonstrations
Charlotte Salomon : a student of Alfred Wolfsohn's a lecture by Clara Silber Harris
WHO WAS ALFRED WOLFSOHN - Marita Günther
“....When
I was discharged from the German Military Hospital in 1919, it was not because
I was 'cured' from either the Mustard gas poisoning I had received in the
trenches, nor the 'Combat Trauma' that I was suffering from due to my service
in the first world war; on the contrary, it was because there was no further
treatment that the doctors were able to offer me. For the next ten years I
struggled with this appalling state of being.
Before 1914 I had perused singing as an interest of mine; partly in connecting
with the musical training I had had, but also because I had a naturally pleasing
singing voice. After the war this was no longer the case. In the ten years
following my release from the Hospital one of the means that I first sort
for re-finding my health, was to try and re-find that lost voice of mine.
I went to a number of highly reputed singing teachers but none of them were
able to help me.
By 1930 I was sufficiently myself again to be able to continue my pre-war
job as a singing coach for professional classical singers; they came to me
to redress their vocal problems; in working with them I began to realise that
their problems, like my own, were based not on their physical condition, but
on their psychic condition. It must be said that at this time the business
of Psychology was in its infancy, so, the psychologists, like myself were
all fumbling in the dark. After a little while I began to get some very encouraging
results from this approach; over half my pupils where receiving sustained
improvements in their singing capacities.
One of my last Berlin pupils, before I fled from Berlin to go to England to
escape the Nazis in 1939, was a young girl called Charlotte
Salomon. She also had fled
from the Nazis a month before me to go to the south of France where she painted
her extraordinary exhibition of paintings called “Life?
or Theatre?”. I was surprised to learn, after her death
at the end of the Second World War, that this collection of paintings; her
life story, had included the story of her relationship to me and to my vocal
teachings. She had included me in the guise of a character called 'Amadeus
Daberlohn'. Her grasp of the work is quite striking. If
ever you have the opportunity of seeing these paintings, they are housed in
the 'Jewish
Museum' in Amsterdam, I cannot recommend them highly enough
to you.... I am hoping that Marita will be successful with the new publishers
she has found for the publication of my book "Orpheus
or the Way to a Mask" , which Charlotte refers to extensively
in her paintings...."
Alfred Wolfsohn London 1962.