Can you talk a little bit about how he's using art to speak to a specific time, but also timelessness?

Well, there's a timelessness, I think, in the story of Candida.

I mean, Voltaire as well as Bernstein, there's a timelessness because it deals with philosophical issues, really.

And so at the end of these adventures and these incredible lives, as exaggerated and impossible as some of it is, the questions are, is life good? Is life bad? Should you be optimistic? Should you be pessimistic? The answer is life is life.

Well, simple, but also at the same time profound.

I mean, we have to find meaning or search for meaning or give up looking for meaning in our lives because life is life.

We live, and that's pretty much all we know, is that we live.

Do you think he ever came to a sense of completeness, a sense of, yeah, this is finished now with Candide?

I'm curious what your favorite show in Europe was specifically in that area.

I was conducting in Paris in the opera the night that France won the World Cup.

And I could remember the screaming from outside the theater was so loud that we knew when France had won.

I mean, that's a night I'll never forget.

And in a way, we're both on a stage.

We're on a stage doing something.

that is connecting with other people.

And you, Sebastian, are in a highly popular art form.

May I ask, when did you first discover this treasure trove that had been left out of the standard repertoire? Was there a particular composer or experience?

The door towards this whole subject opened up to me in the early 1990s, right at the beginning of what was to become a 13-year-long tenure at the Cologne Opera.

Well, I shouldn't say just the Cologne Opera, as general music director of the city, because I was also the orchestra's conductor.

I had only the vaguest of notions that there was music that was composed and suppressed by the Nazis.

Thanks to those years, thanks to the seriousness of the German music public, I became familiar with it, fell in love first with Alexander Zemlinsky, which then led me on to Franz Schraker, to Victor Ullmann, to Erwin Schulhof, and eventually to the whole subject of the music that we don't know and has been neglected primarily because it lost its place in history.

And how tragic that is, of course, for the individuals, but also tragic for us, because as a civilization, we've lost a piece of a puzzle of which we have the other parts.

And it's a multifaceted story.

What do you think the most important criteria are to excel as an opera singer, to break through? Well,

But there's something about the way he writes that really does feel like it's responding so much to the text, and it's, it's disregarding our notions of form.

Well, I think that Zemlinsky, who was identified by none less than Arnold Schoenberg as probably being the greatest, uh, composer of German opera in the 20th century.

Uh, that's a big statement, and I'm a, I'm, uh, prepared to go a long way with it.

He wrote seven operas.

Uh, two of them I think are amongst the greatest operas of the 20th century.

One is Der Zwerg, which is, means The Dwarf, and the other one is, uh, A Florentine Tragedy, both based on texts by Oscar Wilde.

So, um, I think that his music is so compelling, so dramatic, and I've done both of those works on multiple occasions.

[laughs] But why Mozart?