Nikola Hillebrand & Helmut Deutsch

Women's Songs and Lives

"[W]hen you say 'Lied', you mean Schubert," explained musicologist Elmar Budde. This may be an exaggeration, but it is basically in line with what many artists have thought about the "song prince" and put on paper. With the transformation of the strophic song into the form of through-composed dramatic miniatures as well as the emancipation of the accompanying piano movement, Schubert completely redefined the genre in more than 600 songs. "It is unbelievable what music there is in his songs. No composer knows how to declaim properly like him," Johannes Brahms, whose Lied oeuvre of just under 300 works could almost be described as narrow in comparison to Schubert, noted admiringly in 1887. And even Richard Strauss, who composed more than 200 piano songs, confessed some 100 years after Schubert's death: "[...] I had not thought about Schubert, really not - only worshipped him, played and sang and admired him!" Together with Helmut Deutsch, one of the most renowned Lied pianists of our time, the young soprano Nikola Hillebrand, celebrated in both concert and opera, performs selected works by these three outstanding Lied composers under the title Frauenlieder und -leben.