If you happened to be listening to National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition on a Sunday morning in mid-August, you might have heard a story about opera singers learning the German language; an enlightening exchange in the middle of the piece features an instructor and a group of singers discussing a particularly tricky pronunciation trap for nonnative speakers involving the umlaut (a mark of punctuation in the German language).
The back-and-forth is entirely in German, supplemented by the radio reporter’s explanation of what the subjects are talking about. (“Umlauts—those two dots over German vowels—are what he’s talking about. They’re tricky for those who aren’t fluent in German.”)
The story is a fun cultural piece demonstrating how budding opera singers are seeking to become more competitive in auditions in a country teeming with opera houses, nearly 100 in total. The singers and language learners are all participating in a program that is part of Middlebury’s summer German School; each student is enrolled in the seven-week immersion session and signs a pledge to speak (and sing) nothing but German during their time at Middlebury. (A special exemption was allowed for the students to speak English to the NPR reporter.)
Those enrolled in German for Singers attend lectures and master classes in German language and cultural instruction, as well as individual voice coaching sessions and collective tutorials and rehearsals. The NPR reporter, Nina Keck, sat in on one such rehearsal.
“At the end of the day, I know after this program that when I walk into an audition room with other Americans, or people from different countries than Germany, that my German is going to be so well tuned that I will have an advantage,” a student named Mitchell Widmer told Keck.
At the end of the summer session, the newly proficient German singers traveled to northern Germany to practice their craft in a performance of Mozart’s Die verstellte Gärtnerin.
The program’s director is Bettina Matthias, a professor of German and the director of the German School. Its music director is Stefan Rütter.
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