Greetings from the Director

Welcome to our German Summer Singer website.  We’ve had several names for our course over the years.  Our first adventure in 2002 was untitled, and four singers accompanied me to the Freiberg Middle-Saxony Opera House to perform in a production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” conducted by Christoph Sandmann.  Over the next thirteen years, our program grew to included many opportunities to perform with the mainstage opera productions (Tosca, Street Scene, Zauberfloete, Im Weissen Roessel) as well as all-student productions (Pyramus and Thisbe, The Impressario, Bastien and Bastien, Anne Frank, Suor Angelica) with support from the opera house musicians, stage directors and conductors.  During this time our collaboration with Jan Horstmann, the then GMD of the opera house, our course, was called, “Opera, Lieder, Language and Culture of Germany.”  This year, our new logo used the name, “German Opera Experience,” and we have joined forces with New Mexico State University, which is running a parallel program to ours under the leadership of Dr. John Carlo Pierce.  Our collaboration with Raoul Grueneis, the new GMD  and Herr Schultze, the new Intendant at the Freiberg Opera, continues help our program deepen its roots in the community and Middle Saxony.
We are delighted that you are visiting this site, and encourage you to browse through its’ contents.  Our calendar, with our major performing opportunities listed, is available for your perusal.  The twenty-eight 2015 students participating in both our opera and Brahms Lieder seminars will be performing in Freiberg, Doebeln, Klosterbuch, Lauenstein, and Liepzig.   We are pleased to have been invited to collaborate with Radebeul Opera House in Dresden, where our students are performing with their 80 piece orchestra. During the summer, Hartmut Fuchs, creator of this “German Singer Summer” website and a valued member of our German staff, will be posting videos and pictures of the events.
If you are a student or teacher interested in participating in future programs, please do contact us through my university e-mail at James Madison University:  maddisdx@jmu.edu

Dr. Dorothy Maddison
Professor of Voice
MSC 7301
James Madison University School of Music
Harrisonburg Virginia 22807
maddisdx@jmu.edu
office:  540-568-8042