Alfred Wolfsohn

Alfred Wolfsohn (23 September 1896 – 5 February 1962) was a German singing teacher who suffered persistent auditory hallucination of screaming soldiers, whom he had witnessed dying of wounds while serving as a stretcher bearer in the trenches of World War I.Wolfsohn, A., ''Die Brücke''. London 1947 (Manuscript). Trans. Marita Günther and Sheila Braggins. Repository: Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam.Wolfsohn, A., ''Orpheus, oder der Weg zu einer Maske''. Germany 1936–1938 (Manuscript). Trans. Marita Günther. Repository: Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam. Wolfsohn was diagnosed with shell shock, but did not respond to treatment. He subsequently cured himself by vocalizing extreme sounds, bringing about what he described as a combination of catharsis and exorcism.Newham, P. ''The Prophet of Song: The Life and Work of Alfred Wolfsohn''. London 1997. Tigers Eye Press.

Inspired by the range and flexibility of his voice, which developed as a consequence of the exercises and experiments he pursued, Wolfsohn began teaching others to use his vocal techniques as a form of therapeutic expression, which were later incorporated into drama therapy and music therapy. Meanwhile, some pupils of Wolfsohn used the extraordinary vocal range they developed to create performing arts productions, which influenced avant-garde theatre and experimental music.

After Wolfsohn died in 1962, many of his long-standing pupils formed a theatre company called the Roy Hart Theatre, under the direction of South African actor Roy Hart, who had studied with Wolfsohn for fifteen years, which continued to influence practices within expressive arts therapies and the performing arts.

Overview

Alfred Wolfsohn was conscripted to serve as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches of World War I in 1914, when he was eighteen years old. After his discharge, Wolfsohn suffered persistent auditory hallucination of screaming soldiers, whom he had witnessed dying of wounds during his service.

After being subsequently diagnosed with shell shock, Wolfsohn failed to recover in response to hospitalization or psychiatric treatment, but cured himself by vocalizing extreme sounds, bringing about what he described as a combination of catharsis and exorcism.

Inspired by the range and expressiveness of his voice, which resulted from the vocal exercises and techniques he developed in an attempt to heal the symptoms of trauma sustained during the war, Wolfsohn began teaching others, acting as both a singing teacher and psychotherapist, seeking to combine the principles of both disciplines.Newham, P. 'The psychology of voice and the founding of the Roy Hart Theatre'. New Theatre Quarterly IX No. 33. February 1993 pp59-65. Wolfsohn had no formal training in either field, but nonetheless became a critic of traditional vocal pedagogy and an advocate for the principles of analytical psychology developed by Carl Jung.

Wolfsohn began his teaching in Berlin, whilst working with the opera singer Paula Salomon-Lindberg where he developed a close mentoring relationship with the painter Charlotte Salomon. Wolfsohn and his theories inspired Charlotte Salomon to create her artwork ''Leben? Oder Theater? Ein Singespiel'', assigning to him the name ''Amadeus Daberlohn''.Löwenthal Felstiner, M., To Paint her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Mirror. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.Salomon, C., Charlotte: Life or Theatre, ed. U.G. Schwartz with a preface by Judith C. E. Belinfante and an introduction by Judith Herzberg. London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1981.

After escaping Nazi Germany, Wolfsohn came to London and established the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre in a large house in Golders Green, offering an approach to singing lessons and voice training based solely upon his self-devised techniques.Hart, R., et al., 'An Outline of the Work of the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre', subsequently published in 'The Roy Hart Theatre: Documentation and Interviews', Dartington Theatre Papers, ed. David Williams, Fifth Series, No. 14, pp2–7. Series ed. Peter Hulton. Dartington College of Arts, 1985.
The aim of his lessons was to help students extend the range and expressiveness of their voice to include every possible vocal sound, which he believed both represented and precipitated the realization of increased human potential in other areas of life.Shepard, L., ''An Empirical Therapy Based on an Extension of Vocal Range and Expression in Singing and Drama''. Paper read at the Sixth International Congress of Psychotherapy, London, August 1964. Repository: Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre Archives. Curated by Leslie Shepard, Dublin, Ireland.

Wolfsohn subscribed to the views of Carl Jung, who proposed that each human psyche comprises a composite of subpersonalities that appear most vividly in dreams. Wolfsohn sought to enable the expression of these subpersonalities through distinct vocal sounds.
Stevens, A., On Jung. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.Newham, P. (1990) 'The voice and the shadow'. Performance 60, Spring 1990, pp. 37-47.Newham, P. (1992) 'Jung and Alfred Wolfsohn: analytical psychology and the singing voice.' Journal of Analytical Psychology, 37, pp.323-336.

A number of notable authors, theatre directors, philosophers, and scientists took lessons with Wolfsohn, or observed demonstrations by his students, subsequently acknowledging his contribution to their work, including Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, R. D. Laing, Irene Worth, Jean-Louis Barrault, Aldous Huxley, and Julian Huxley.Wolfsohn, A., Letters to Aldous Huxley. April - July 1958. Repository: Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre Archives. Curated by Leslie Shepard, Dublin, Ireland.

When Wolfsohn died in 1962, the group of long-standing students divided.

One group continued to train their voices under the leadership of Roy Hart, a South African actor and regular attendant of the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre since 1947, who extended the vocal demonstrations for invited audiences, instigated by Wolfsohn, into full public performances, including ''Eight Songs for a Mad King'', composed especially for Hart by Peter Maxwell Davies.

This group left the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre in Golders Green in 1969, migrated to new premises in Hampstead, and formed a performing arts troupe, assuming the name the Roy Hart Theatre, which included some who like Hart had studied with Alfred Wolfsohn, and others who had never met the German teacher, but had been students in Hart's drama classes, which the South African actor began teaching at venues across London during the late 1950s.

In 1974 the Roy Hart Theatre moved to the south of France to establish a permanent rehearsal studio, school, and drama troupe. Roy Hart died in a car accident a year later, but the French-based group of remaining members continued producing experimental theatre and music productions and teaching the approach to vocal expression initially established by Wolfsohn. The other group, including vocalist Jenny Johnson and film maker, author, and archivist Leslie Shepard, dispersed and sought to continue the work of the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre.

Alfred Wolfsohn was instrumental in precipitating and inspiring many types of extended vocal technique used by performing artists who incorporate into their performances sounds not usually used in speech or song. In addition, Wolfsohn was a major influence on the therapeutic and creative work of Paul Newham, Wolfsohn's official biographer who together with Leslie Shepard re-established the London base for the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre in 1990.

Childhood

Alfred Wolfsohn was born in Berlin into a German Jewish family.

In his unpublished manuscripts, Wolfsohn repeatedly describes himself as an exceptionally detached child, an outsider, and an observer, and he attributes this experience to being one of few Jewish children at school.Wolfsohn, A., ''The Problem of Limitations''. London 1958 (Manuscript). Trans. Kaya Anderson. Repository: Roy Hart Theatre Archives, Malérargues, France.

When Wolfsohn was 10 years old, his father, who had been a rifleman in the Franco-Prussian War, died of tuberculosis.
Prior to his father's death, Wolfsohn had been disturbed by the sounds of his mother screaming during sexual intercourse, which he could hear from his bedroom. After his father died, Wolfsohn developed a close relationship with his mother, who comforted him by singing, using a high voice to depict an angel and a low voice for St Peter. Wolfsohn asserted that hearing his mother express both unpleasant screams and beautiful singing contributed to his belief that the human voice should be able to express the complete spectrum of human emotion.

World War I and illness

In 1914, Wolfsohn was conscripted to military service and served as a stretcher bearer in the trenches of World War I along both the Eastern and Western front. During this time, Wolfsohn became disturbed by the vocal sounds that wounded and dying soldiers made. Furthermore, he experienced intense guilt at having run for safety, leaving behind a badly wounded soldier, rather than risking his own life to save the dying man.Günther, M., The Human Voice, Paper read at the National Conference on Drama Therapy, Antioch University, San Francisco, November 1986. Published on audio tape by Roy Hart Theatre, Malérargues, France.Newham, P., The Singing Cure: An Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy. London: Random House, 1993 and Boston: Shambhala, 1994.

After the war, Wolfsohn was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Berlin, where he was diagnosed with shell shock, prescribed medication, and underwent hypnosis. Wolfsohn complained that his treatment failed to alleviate the auditory hallucinations of the vocal screams he had heard whilst serving in the trenches. Wolfsohn later recorded that, after being discharged from hospital, he felt as though he was dead for many years, but came back to life when he started singing.

Recovery and initial experimental work

After discharge from hospital, Wolfsohn worked in a variety of positions, including rent-collector, bank teller, piano player for silent films, and hazzan at synagogue funerals. During this period, he also took singing lessons with a range of teachers.

Although he attributed his recovery from shell shock to these lessons, he also criticized his teachers for their adherence to a classical bel canto approach, which prohibited him from giving voice to the sounds he had heard in the trenches. He therefore supplemented and eventually replaced the singing lessons with his own experiments, seeking to push his voice to its limits in range and timbre.Salomon-Lindberg, P., interviewed by Paul Newham, Amsterdam, August 1991. Repository: Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre Archives. Curated by Paul Newham, London.

Early teaching

In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and Wolfsohn began to experience the discrimination to which all German Jews were subjected at that time.

With the rise of the Third Reich, Wolfsohn recognized that Jews with formal employment were in a better position to avoid Nazi harassment, and in 1935 went to Dr. Kurt Singer, founder of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a cultural association promoting Jewish art and culture. Singer, who was a conductor, musician, musicologist, neurologist, and director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, sought to combat antisemitism by drawing attention to the Jewish arts. He convinced the Nazis to permit a safe haven for talented Jewish artists, so they could perform for an exclusively Jewish public in community centres, synagogues, and private homes.

Kurt Singer put Wolfsohn in touch with the opera singer Paula Salomon-Lindberg, who offered him lodging and a job teaching singing to those she described as her less gifted pupils.

It was then that Wolfsohn began to combine his understanding of firstly the psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud, and later the analytical psychology evolved by Carl Jung, with his unconventional approach to vocal pedagogy, seeking to help others use the singing lesson as a means to assuage and alleviate emotional and psychological difficulties.

Wolfsohn also developed a close relationship with Paula Salomon-Lindberg's stepdaughter Charlotte Salomon, whom he mentored. Charlotte Salomon documented her relationship with Wolfsohn in a series of paintings, in which he appears as an elusive personal tutor called ''Amadeus Daberlohn''.

Escaping Nazi Germany

In January 1939, Charlotte Salomon left Germany for the south of France, and a month later, Wolfsohn fled Berlin and went to London. He volunteered to the British Royal Pioneer Corps but was later discharged, having been classified as an invalid.

In October 1943 Charlotte Salomon was captured in Nice, and dispatched to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were killed by the Nazis.

In the same year, Wolfsohn was given permission by the British government to teach singing lessons, which he began at a house in North London that he named the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre.
The research, experimentation and tutoring at the centre first attracted public attention ten years later on 22 November 1953, when a journalist observed him working with two of his pupils, Jenny Johnson and Jill Johnson. The journalist's article said of them: "They can sing deeper than Paul Robeson and higher than Yma Sumac. In fact, they have crashed through the musical sound barrier".Author unknown, 'He Gives the Girls 7-Octave Voices', unknown newspaper, 22 November 1953. Repository: Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Centre Archives. Curated by Leslie Shepard, Dublin, Ireland.

There followed a series of reports in national newspapers, all of which concentrated on the extended vocal range demonstrated by Wolfsohn's pupils, with scant reference to any psychotherapeutic benefits of his techniques.

The lack of formal recognition as a contributor to psychotherapy remained a frustration to Wolfson, culminating in his failure to secure a meeting with Carl Jung.

Scientific analysis and artistic application

In August 1955 the voice of Jenny Johnson was examined by Professor Richard Luchsinger of the Zurich Otolaryngological Clinic, the results of which were presented in a lecture before the German Society for Speech and Voice Therapy in Hamburg and subsequently published in an article co-written with C.L. Dubois later that year.Luchsinger, R. and Dubois, C.L., 'Phonetische und stroboskopische Untersüchungen an einem Stimmphänomen', Folia Phoniatrica, 8: No. 4, pp201–210. Trans. Ian Halcrow. 1956.
This was the first clinical examination of a voice trained in the extended vocal technique established by Wolfsohn and consisted of phonetic examination, laryngoscopy, stroboscopy, electro-acoustical analysis and a tomographical investigation. Luchsinger's examinations revealed that Johnson's larynx and pharynx showed no structural abnormality, but was small and symmetrical, corresponding to that of a coloratura soprano. The recordings verified what Luchsinger described as an extraordinarily large vocal range, from C (65 c.p.s.) to f4 sharp (2960 c.p.s.), or 5 octaves and 6 tones. Thirty-seven years later, in 1992, consultant laryngologist David Garfield-Davies recorded a video stroboscopic examination of Paul Newham demonstrating an extended vocal technique derivative of Wolfsohn's approach at the Ferens Institute Voice Clinic, part of the Middlesex Hospital which showed how extended vocal flexibility can be produced without damage to the vocal apparatus.

In 1956 Jenny Johnson performed in the Hoffnung Music Festival, receiving favourable reviews. During the same year Smithsonian Folkways released a vinyl long playing record of Wolfsohn's pupils demonstrating an extended vocal range, called ''Vox Humana''. Also in 1956, the BBC
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