Liederabend: Wolfgang Holzmair sings the songs of Max Kowalski

The Leo Baeck Institute and the American Society for Jewish Music invite you for a night of live music with Wolfgang Holzmair and Thérèse Lindquist on February 7th, 7:30PM EST at the Center for Jewish History.

Max Kowalski (1882–1956) was born in Poland but raised and educated in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied composition with Bernhard Sekles. He also obtained a law degree from the Univerisity of Marburg and represented musicians and composers including Arnold Schoenberg. A specialist in lieder whose setting of Guiraud’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) earned him early accolades, he had a productive career as both an attorney and a widely published composer until the Nazi rise to power. Following his wife's suicide and his own arrest and internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Kowalski emigrated to London in 1939. He struggled to regain his earlier success as a composer and made a living as a teacher, cantor, and piano tuner.

Reflecting on his own work as an artist Kowalski once observed,“I am not concerned with any kind of ‘principles.’ I am an arch-romantic and rely wholly on feeling.” And then in a turn to Goethe’s Faust, “Feeling is all!”