L'Amour et la Mort Hermine May & Manuel Lange

• Henri Duparc (1848 - 1933): La Vie Antérieure:
• 1 Duparc: La Vie Antérieure 04:15
• L'Invitation au Voyage:
• 2 Duparc: L'Invitation au Voyage 04:13
• Testament:
• 3 Duparc: Testament 03:19
• Chanson triste:
• 4 Duparc: Chanson triste 03:35
• Le Manoir de Rosemonde:
• 5 Duparc: Le Manoir de Rosemonde 02:45
• Phidylé:
• 6 Duparc: Phidylé 05:20
• Soupir:
• 7 Duparc: Soupir 03:22
• Élégie:
• 8 Duparc: Élégie 03:06
• Extase:
• 9 Duparc: Extase 03:01
• Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883): Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91:
• 10 Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91: No. 1, Der Engel 03:10
• 11 Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91: No. 2, Stehe still! 03:53
• 12 Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91: No. 3, Im Treibhaus 05:43
• 13 Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91: No. 4, Schmerzen 02:31
• 14 Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder, WWV 91: No. 5, Träume 05:11
• 15 Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90: Isoldens Liebestod (arr. for Piano by Franz Liszt) 06:25
• Total Runtime 59:49

Info for L'Amour et la Mort

Existential: Mezzo-soprano Hermine May and pianist Manuel Lange invite you into Wagner's world of Tristan and Isolde where insatiable yearnings are awakened, passions heightened and where the fervent desire to transcend reality finds supreme love beyond death in Liebestod.

Smouldering: The Wesendonck Lieder build a musical bridge to the opera, with Im Treibhaus and Traume described by Wagner himself as "studies for Tristan". Isoldens Liebestod is an emotionally charged, virtuosic piano version, arranged by Wagner's friend and father-in-law Franz Liszt, which is combined here with Wagner's original vocal part for Isolde.

Intoxicating: Henri Duparc's chansons in L'amour et la mort narrate the stages of Tristan's love from dreamy longing, through forbidden lustful fulfilment, to Isolde's fatal ecstasy in an impressionistic tonal language that repeatedly revolves around Tristan motifs and variations of its famous chord.

Ethereal: Hardly any other French composer was as greatly influenced by the Bayreuth master as Duparc. The rampant wagnerisme in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century had enraptured him, especially the love-death mysticism of Tristan and Isolde. His famous melodies, even though only 17 of his songs have survived, are such jewels of musical prosody that Duparc became known as one of the most important French song composers. <

Hermine May, Mezzo-soprano
Manuel Lange, piano

Please Note: we do not offer the 96kHz version of this album, because our analyses clearly showed, that the 96kHz does not reach a frequency spectrum, that would justify to offer 96kHz. Hence we offer the album 48kHz.

Hermine May
Romanian-born mezzo-soprano Hermine May studied singing with Prof. Sylvia Geszty at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart. She has won numerous prestigious competitions and began her singing career as a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Since then, she has worked as a freelance singer and has continuously developed the dramatic roles in her field. Today, Carmen, Amneris, Eboli, Ortrud, Kundry, Brangäne, Venus, Dalila and Azucena are among her favourite roles, which she has sung at opera houses in Turin, Rome, Verona, Naples, Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Nice, Graz, Shanghai and Hong Kong, among others.

In 2012 she made her debut at the Scala di Milano with “Une voix” in the Opera “Les contes d‘ Hofmann“. The same year Hermine May sang Kundry in Parsifal at the Richard Wagner Festival in Wels (Austria). Brangäne/ Tristan and Isolde and Venus/ Tannhäuser followed at the Festival which prepared her way for this repertoire.

Musically, she was influenced through her work with Zubin Mehta. Under his baton she sang the Magdalene in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, also the Zemlinsky Maeterlinck–Lieder and the alto part in Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 9 with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv. Raffael Frühbeck de Burgos, Nello Santi, Pinchas Steinberg, Friedemann Layer, Teodor Currentzis, Gianluigi Gelmetti and Ralf Weikert are other important conducters who gave her artistic impulses.

On the concert stage, she has had great success with the compositions by Gustav Mahler, the Verdi-Requiem, Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody and Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder. From the beginning of her career she concentrated extensively on the Lied repertoire.

Hermine May’s CD recordings include Bellini’s “Il Pirata” with Lucia Aliberti conducted by Marcello Viotti, Schubert’s Mass in E-Flat with Jonas Kaufmann, Hermann Prey and Deon van der Walt under the baton of Sylvain Cambreling and Carl Loewe’s “Die drei Wünsche”. DVD-productions of Carmen and Aida/Amneris demonstrate her creative power on stage.

Since 2020 Hermine May has been a faculty member of the Rostock University of Music and Theatre.

Manuel Lange
The Berlin-born pianist studied piano with Oleg Maisenberg in Stuttgart and Hans Leygraf in Salzburg and Berlin. He also took song masterclasses with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Aribert Reimann and Wolfram Rieger. During his studies, he won first prize for piano accompaniment in the international Paula Salomon-Lindberg Song Competition „Das Lied“, the special prize for best piano accompaniment at the Hilde Zadek Voice Competition in Passau and the Hanns Eisler prize at the Academy of Music „Hanns Eisler“.

In 2006, he came together with baritone Sebastian Noack to found the MEISTERLIED concert series in Berlin, which is primarily dedicated to German romantic Lied. After several years of working as Song Repertoire Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Manuel lange accepted a call of the Hochschule für Musik Detmold to become Professor of Lied Accompaniment and Lied Composition.

Manuel Lange has appeared in concert partnering Anne Schwanewilms, Mojca Erdmann, Maria Bengtsson, Sibylla Rubens, Stella Doufexis, Lothar Odinius, Jussi Myllys, Sebastian Noack and many more on all major concert venus throughout Europe and gets invited at festivals such as the Baden- Baden summer festival, the Ruhrtriennale, the Lake Constance Music Festival, Autumn Music Days in Bad Urach and the Bebersee Festival.

Manuel Lange lives with his wife and two children in Berlin. He is the twin brother of the composer Marius Felix Lange.

Booklet for L'Amour et la Mort