The Divan of Moses-ibn-Ezra, performed by German guitarist Anne Haasch and French mezzo soprano Natalie Perez, is the heart of the new CD Songs of Wandering (Genuin Classics). Humbled by her experiences of meeting survivors of Nazi-Fascist persecution, Anne connects at a human level as well as at a musical one with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s guitar works, and in particular with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s setting of verses by the exiled medieval Jewish poet Moses ibn Ezra. Anne kindly agreed to tell us about how this project came to be, her collaboration with Natalie Perez, and what this music means to her.
Interview with Anne Haasch by Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco – June 2025
Anne, please begin by telling us a little bit about yourself and your musical journey.
Diana, first of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to do this interview and for your interest in my work.
I studied guitar in Weimar and have always been very interested in the background of works and historical contexts. I like to look for lesser-known repertoire or try to connect works in concert that are linked by a “common thread”, for example, or present exciting juxtapositions. I don’t just want to play music, I also want to make the contexts of its creation or time and place of origin comprehensible. I have been working with students for many years and try to convey precisely these ideas about dramaturgy or curation, in addition to all the other important skills.
I came into contact with the music of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco as a teenager and was immediately enchanted. Since then, I have had a very special fondness for your grandfather’s music and that of his contemporaries such as Manuel Maria Ponce, Alexandre Tansman, Roberto Gerhard, Darius Milhaud, and Antonio José.
In the notes to your CD, you wrote that meeting Holocaust survivors at the “Ostracized Music” Festival was a defining moment for you. Whom did you meet there, and how did the experience impact you?
In 2010, I took part in a competition for “ostracized music” [works banned or marginalized by the Nazi regime due to their creators’ Jewish heritage, political stance, or avant-garde style] in Schwerin. I came across this competition by chance and immediately found the idea exciting. The focus was on a specific repertoire, and it wasn’t just a guitar competition, but a music competition. At the time, I already had a few of the Caprichos de Goya in my repertoire, as well as the Fantasia by Roberto Gerhard and works by Alexandre Tansman. So I went to this competition and found myself sitting in the adjudication room opposite Shoah survivors Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Walter Arlen, Coco Schumann and Alexandre Tansman’s daughters, among others. At the time, I had already read Lasker-Wallfisch’s memoir about the girls’ orchestra in Auschwitz. I was deeply impressed and, to be honest, left speechless by meeting the contemporary witnesses – [I felt] a great mixture of very different feelings. In the years that followed, I also had the opportunity to meet Rabbi William Wolff and Esther Béjarano.
The history and crimes of Nazi Germany are very present in the German education system: you visit concentration camps, for example; but to actually sit opposite contemporary witnesses, to see a tattooed number on your arm, to hear stories of escape, or simply to hear Walter Arlen say that he was a good friend of Castelnuovo-Tedesco allowed me to establish a kind of connection from music and composer to the present to my own artistic work. Having had this experience fills me with the deepest gratitude and humility.
Only a few people still have this direct face-to-face opportunity. Since then, ostracized music has always been a part of my work. In addition to the Divan on the current CD, I was recently able to perform works by Ruth Schöntal, Hanns Eisler, Norbert Glanzberg, Ilse Weber, Fritz Lettow and others together with the tenor Julian Prégardien in Weimar and Berlin at a new festival entitled Liedstadt, which focused on ostracized music and the culture of remembrance.
At what point did the music of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and the Divan of Moses-Ibn-Ezra in particular, enter your world? What inspired you to devote an entire CD to Mario’s music?
As Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is one of the most important and prolific composers for the guitar, he is, of course, very familiar to me and us guitarists. Since my early youth, I have listened to his works again and again and have always loved this special tonal language, the particular counterpoint, a certain humor and irony, as well as his gift for great phrases and melancholy. During my studies, I was particularly interested in the Caprichos de Goya, the Variations à travers les siècles, op. 71 and as well as chamber music (the guitar duos and the Sonatina for flute and guitar, op. 205). Three years ago, I ventured into the Capricho No. 18. It was always a goal to be able to play it at some point; it was a huge challenge, as the music is so uniquely beautiful but also so incredibly challenging.
I had heard the Divan on an old recording early on in my studies but then lost track of it. It’s a wonderful work, but, until recently, there were only a few recordings, and you hardly ever hear it in concert. Three years ago, I studied the Guitar Quintet op 143 for a concert and was awarded a scholarship to study Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s works. As I love the Lied genre very much, I came back to the Divan, got the sheet music and studied this great cycle.
The longer I worked on it, the more enthusiastic I became about Ibn Ezra’s texts and Tedesco’s setting. I realized that this cycle of poems, written by an elderly Jewish poet from Granada who had to flee his homeland, is perhaps Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s most personal work. After all, Castelnuovo had family roots in Spain. The Divan seemed to me like a very personal dialogue between two older men across the centuries – about friendship, love, death, loss of home, exile, eternal wandering and what one bequeaths to the next generation; that what remains. I wanted to capture that. There were also a few aspects that I wasn’t entirely happy with in other recordings, such as the clarity of the lyrics. This cycle is extremely challenging for singers, as they are constantly singing in the passaggio. Natalie and I resolved the issue by tuning the guitar to a lower, quasi-historical pitch, which allowed the text to come through more clearly.
It was also clear from the outset that we should include on the CD both the Variations op. 71, also a journey through time and a prophetic tale of the composer’s own exile, and Capricho No. 18, which tells of the sleep/dream of reason and the resulting abysses, as a path to the Divan.
How did you and Natalie Perez meet and decide to work together on this project?
I met Natalie Perez at a concert in Weimar in 2022. She sang Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch with colleagues, and we got to know each other over a glass of wine after the concert. We hit it off straight away, and she casually said that she would like to do something with the guitar. She had already had some experience with early music, including historical plucked instruments, and knew a lot about the special features of the guitar as opposed to the piano. At the time I had a copy of the Divan lying on the table, so I sent it to her. She was crazy enough to agree to this special musical journey. I traveled to France, we worked on the Divan together, and Natalie began to love it too. She had studied in London and speaks perfect, accent-free English – an absolute godsend for understanding these not-so-easy texts and, of course, for singing them.
As two women with much of your artistic lives still ahead of you, how did you get into the mindset and emotions of Moses ibn Ezra and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, two exiled men at the end of their lives?
That is a difficult question. I, and I think Natalie too, grew up very sheltered and safe. War, flight, expulsion and existential hardship never played a role in our lives. From this position, you will never really be able to put yourself in the shoes of Ibn-Ezra or Castelnuovo-Tedesco, for example. But we had both read a lot about history, about ostracized music, and we were open and emphatic about approaching it through the music and the emotions it evoked. I think that a certain distance is also a good thing. Of course, we are both artists. As an opera singer, Natalie is much more capable of creating certain moods or putting herself in a character’s shoes. But we also really wanted an outside perspective on this very special dialog between two old men. There are also songs in the cycle that would no longer be written today, for example about the world being a woman gone mad … We approached this song with a great deal of irony. It also only addresses the sons, not the daughters. But we can put that into context and bring it into the here and now. And then the cycle takes on a frightening, timeless topicality that unfortunately also describes the current situation in the world very well.
It was also exciting that the head of Genuin, who produced the CD, casually asked me whether Natalie had Sephardic roots. In fact, the name Perez can be a Sephardic name, and Natalie’s family also experienced migration from North Africa in the more distant generations. And many Sephardim also fled Andalusia via these routes – at the same time as the Castelnuovos left Spain for Italy. Natalie doesn’t know whether these Jewish roots also existed in her family, but it doesn’t seem completely out of the question. It leaves me in awe when these connections suddenly open up in all areas.
What impact did studying and performing Mario’s music, and the Divan in particular, have on you?
First and foremost, I really enjoy listening to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music, his musical narratives. The music is very familiar to me, and I love the challenges we have to face, because the works are not necessarily easy to play. In concerts, I have the feeling that many listeners, even those who don’t know the guitar repertoire very well, love Tedesco’s music very quickly and find it easy to access, if it is performed well. I think Tedesco knew very well how to reach people – otherwise you can’t be such a successful film composer and teacher. I suppose that is also my approach – this music is deeply human, emphatic, not at all gimmicky, yet highly virtuosic and always profound, with a good pinch of humor.
I have already mentioned that I had the good fortune to meet Walter Arlen, a close friend of Tedesco’s. It was in 2010, but I vividly remember his warm smile and great joie de vivre. Despite all the terrible things that had happened to him, he had not become bitter. When I see pictures of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, there is always a very loving, humble, grateful and somewhat melancholy smile – both of those images touch me deeply. [Holocaust survivor] Margot Friedländer passed away recently and left behind such a fitting sentence: “Be human. Be sensible.”
Making music is deeply human, it is a basic need. Being able to make a living from it (professionally) is an absolute privilege, which for me personally is linked to the task of mediating – as a teacher, on stage between composer and audience; [my goal is] to create an aesthetic environment that enables dialog, appeals to people, challenges them, shakes them up and, of course, consoles them. Composers such as Castelnuovo-Tedesco, in works like the Divan, which are also highly political, remind me every day that we can all make small contributions to making the world a little more peaceful and empathetic.
Anne, thank you for sharing your passion for this music with us. I particularly appreciate how you and Natalie have focused on Mario’s human journey to enhance your sense of connection with his works. Congratulations on bringing this intensely felt project to fruition.