Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen sometimes feels constrained.
The award-winning opera singer is a countertenor, a vocal range that’s higher in men (think many of today’s male pop singers) than the more typical lower ranges of male singing in classical music.
“We tend to be very typecast into just two buckets of music,” Nussbaum Cohen said. The first bucket is Baroque music of the 17th and 18th centuries, “back when they were castrating boys, and [today’s countertenors] are singing the music that was written for those castrati.”
The second bucket is modern music written for countertenors, beginning in the mid-1900s.
“But there’s this whole gap in the middle, of a couple hundred years [of music], that countertenors never do,” Nussbaum Cohen said. “Something that’s always been appealing to me is breaking the mold.”
Now, he’ll be doing exactly that on Sunday, Feb. 9, at a concert at Macalester College in St. Paul.
Nussbaum Cohen will perform music that countertenors rarely get to sing from Romantic composers like Johannes Brahms, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Accompanied by pianist John Churchwell, he’ll also sing Jewish standards like the Barbara Streisand-popularized “Avinu Malkeinu,” music from Black composers Leslie Adams and Florence Price, and the world premiere of a new piece from composer Jake Heggie.
“It’s music that I absolutely adore and that just really speaks to my musical neshama (soul),” Nussbaum Cohen said.
The concert kicks off a national tour centered on “Uncharted,” Nussbaum Cohen’s new album, releasing on Feb. 7 (available digitally and on CD). It’s the first time a countertenor has recorded the Romantic composers’ music, which are in the style of German Lieder, songs with piano accompaniment often about nature.
But there’s also a deeper story behind the performance. Nussbaum Cohen is the grandson of German-Jewish Holocaust survivors, and the music on “Uncharted” is also a way to connect to his heritage. Most of the music – from Brahms and the Schumanns – is by German composers, with one notable exception.
Korngold was an Austrian-Jewish composer who fled the Nazis and became a celebrated film composer in the U.S. For Nussbaum Cohen, singing Korngold’s music has a special resonance.
“He ended up becoming this big Hollywood composer, and won Oscars, and had this whole other life,” Nussbaum Cohen said. “But this is music he wrote while he was still in Europe, and it’s really kind of foreshadowing. It’s these songs of farewell, saying goodbye to loved ones, and what that emotional journey is like – which he wrote 20 years before he had to leave Europe.”
Nussbaum Cohen has spent much of his life navigating the complex relationship that Holocaust survivors and their descendants have with Europe.
Nussbaum Cohen’s grandfather was born in Germany, and as a child his family was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp after the Nazi pogrom Kristallnacht. After a Nazi guard was bribed, the family members got out, and shortly afterward they left the country.
While Nussbaum Cohen grew up in the U.S. with some sense of German Jewish identity – family members still made German food, for example – his grandfather wanted nothing to do with Germany.
“For his 70th birthday, we had surprised him with, ‘Let’s take a family trip back to Germany, go back to the village where you were born and lived until you were eight years old,’” Nussbaum Cohen said. “We [wanted] to take this journey together. And he said, ‘Absolutely not. I have no interest in stepping foot in that country.’ And we said, ‘Absolutely understood.’”
When his grandfather died, the family found, in the back of a closet, a metal box that held all the documentation of the flight from Nazi Germany. There were passports stamped with swastikas, which also had name changes that Nazi laws had forced to ostracize German Jews.
“Finding those documents was really this kind of revelation of the history that we had in Germany,” Nussbaum Cohen said. “It really made it come alive in a way that he had never wanted to speak about.”
As Nussbaum Cohen was pursuing a career as an opera singer, he used the documents to regain German citizenship. Initially, it was more for the ease of the EU passport when studying and working in Europe.
But as it so happens, Berlin is now practically the opera capital of the world – which means Nussbaum Cohen has spent a lot of time back in Germany.
Doing so has been a meaningful act for Nussbaum Cohen, and he wishes his grandfather were still alive to see his grandson not just return to Germany, but headline performances (like that of Julius Caesar, now a staple role) to critical acclaim there.
“When I first started singing in places like [Russia] and in Germany, countries where our people have been treated terribly throughout history, one of my sisters said to me, ‘Don’t you feel conflicted, you’re going to give your talents to a place that treated us so terribly?’” he recalled.
“I said, actually, no, it’s the most meaningful thing of all, because it’s taken some time, but here we are, and here I am – a loud and proud Jew with maybe the most Jewish name you could possibly ask for, being lauded as Julius Caesar.”
