|
The American tenor and music pedagogue, David Steinau, obtained his Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern University; his Master of Music degree from the New England Conservatory; and his DMA degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His teachers and coaches have included Edward Zambara, Richard Hughes, Jerold Siena, John Moriarty and John Wustman. He also has studied at the Goethe Institutes in Göttingen and Bonn, Germany.
David Steinau is chair of the Department of Music at Susquehanna University (since August 2002), where he also teaches voice and directs the Opera Studio. He has staged the department’s productions of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, The Mikado, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and Weill’s Street Scene, as well as two rare operas from the 1940's: Hans Krasa’s Brundibar and Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis. He also has conducted Susquehanna productions of two Sondheim musicals, Into the Woods and Passion, and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. He co-directs the annual GO Austria trip, which takes students to Salzburg and Vienna for three weeks each May. His graduating seniors at Susquehanna have been admitted to master’s degree programs in vocal performance at Eastman, Peabody, the New England Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, Florida State University, the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois, among others.
David Steinau's research interests include the music of of the 20th-century German composer Hanns Eisler, who was a frequent collaborator of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. He has delivered papers on H. Eisler and Brecht at numerous conferences in Europe and the USA, , where he has presented his studies of H. Eisler’s songs, and to concert stages where he has organized and appeared in performances of H. Eisler’s music.. He spent the summer of 2007 as a visiting scholar at Stanford University participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, which examined the German-speaking artists, including H. Eisler, who settled in California during World War II.
As a singer, David Steinau has appeared in operas ranging from W.A. Mozart to Benjamin Britten and in oratorios of George Frideric Handel, J. Haydn, and J.S. Bach. A performer in opera and concert, he has sung the leading tenor roles in The Barber of Seville, W.A. Mozart's The Magic Flute, W.A. Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, La Boheme, Manon, Die Fledermaus and B. Britten's Albert Herring, among others. He appeared as a soloist with the Susquehanna University Festival Choir and Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in March 2008 as part of the university’s sesquicentennial celebration. He currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. |
