Christian Immler on Be Still My Heart

One of my favourite song recordings of 2025 came courtesy of German bass-baritone Christian Immler and pianist Helmut Deutsch, whose Be Still My Heart shone a welcome light on two composers whose names were entirely new to me at the beginning of the year: Swiss-born Robert Gund (a close associate of Brahms and teacher of Alma Mahler) and musical chameleon Wilhelm Grosz, who studied with Franz Schreker and forged a hugely successful song-writing career in the United States after fleeing his native Vienna as anti-Semitism took hold in the mid-1930s.

In the run-up to the release of Bach's St John Passion with Pygmalion and Raphaël Pichon (on which Immler sings the bass arias and Pilatus), I caught up with Christian to find out more about the life and work of both men, the joys of championing neglected composers, and his longstanding friendship with Deutsch (a fellow enthusiast for lesser-spotted song repertoire)...

Why did you decide to pair these two little-known composers?

They work well together for a couple of reasons, but in all honesty there’s no direct connection! The project began with Wilhelm Grosz, and I came across Robert Gund through the pianist and friend Helmut Deutsch when I was looking for something that would make a nice contrast but which was also part of that Viennese continuum: Gund was writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, and then Grosz takes over from around 1920.

I wrote my doctorate about the recital scene in Vienna between the two World Wars. There isn’t much literature you can access, but this period was extremely rich and very diverse. I’d already recorded some of Grosz’s Berlin-style cabaret songs and thought there must be more… I have friends in the Exilarte Center in Vienna, led by Michael Haas (with whom I’ve had the pleasure to record several times) and Professor Gerold Gruber, and they hold the estate of the Grosz family. 

Did the Lieder you discovered occupy a different world to those Berlin cabaret songs?

The piano writing is very dense and intricate, in a way which reminds me of late French Impressionism – Helmut and I both heard whispers of Debussy. And the vocal line meanders like Korngold: it’s liquid gold, but you need to be in full command of long legato phrases.

We were very happy to discover some lighter English-language songs which he wrote in New York in 1939; they were all in manuscript, and some of them didn’t even have any words. My wife Silvia Fraser is an excellent pianist and professor in Lausanne, and she wrote some wonderful and witty texts so that we could perform and record them.

We definitely hear the influence of modern 1920/30 Berlin and the slightly more traditional Vienna. Grosz came from a rather rich Viennese jeweller’s family, so he could afford to travel while studying with Franz Schreker in Vienna. In Berlin, he pursued a second career writing for the radio. For a few years he was in charge of the Ultraphon Record Company (the precursor of Telefunken), and I think that probably influenced his writing.

During my doctoral research I read that he advised his old teacher Schreker about new compositional techniques for the radio, explaining that certain frequencies would be captured better than others and how that might feed into orchestration and dynamic markings. It’s super-smart stuff, and Schreker became director of the Musikhochschule in Berlin, so his influence was considerable. The radio was very much the new modern medium: Kurt Weill writes in 1926 that it’s the one thing everybody’s talking about. It must’ve been like the launch of Netflix!

How did his style change when he resettled in the UK?

He didn’t have much choice about the move: when jewellery stores in Vienna started being destroyed by right-wing Nationalistic parties it dawned on them that they had to get out quickly. Like Hans Gál (whose songs I’ve also recorded), they sought refuge in England; Gál was interned as an enemy alien, but Grosz avoided that and embarked on a very prolific songwriting career and collaboration with the lyricist Jimmy Kennedy. 

His ‘Isle of Capri’ was the hit song of 1937, and testifies to his great gift for melody: it has just the right length and lilt, and yet it’s not cheap. It’s crooning at its best, and so many people picked up on this later on – Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, The Beatles and Elvis Presley all covered some of his songs. Very low down on the credits you see ‘Will Gross’, ‘André Milos’, ‘Hugh Williams’ or even  ‘Hugh Grant’ – just some of his pseudonyms!

And he started writing for radio again, for a company which would later become EMI – the so-called ‘Tin Pin Alley’ which produced all those hits like 'Isle of Capri', 'Red Sails in the Sunset', and 'Red Maple Leaves'. He eventually relocated to the US on the invitation of Korngold, who was already established in Hollywood and facilitated a contract for Grosz with Warner Studios. The two of them went to primary school together - and I’m pretty sure that Helmut went to the same school as well!

Did the Warner contract come to fruition?

The sad thing is that Grosz never made it to Hollywood, because he suffered a fatal heart-attack in 1939. It was aggravated by the fact that he lost contact with his daughter when he emigrated to New York ahead of his family - she turned out to be fine, but as a parent myself I can only imagine the heartache. He was accompanying the trio from Der Rosenkavalier in a private concert one evening, and passed away on the Marschallin’s line ‘In Gottes Namen!’.

In my opinion he would have made incredible contributions to all the studios in Hollywood, just like Korngold did. He’d already started to orchestrate the music for the film Santa Fe Trail, featuring Ronald Reagan – at the very end you hear his melody in the orchestra. It was intended to be sung, but they had to salvage what he left behind before passing away.

Are there any parallels between Grosz’s life and Gund’s experiences?

Although Gund wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have the same terrible experience as Grosz (whose name ended up on the notorious 'Entartete Musik' list engineered by Goebbels), he was affected by World War One to some extent. After the War all of his income-streams just fell away, and it became difficult for him to make a living despite all the high-profile connections he’d cultivated.

Gund was born in Switzerland in 1865, as Robert Gound; in 1916 he dropped the ‘o’ on the advice of his mother, because at that point a French-sounding name would suggest that you came from the enemy side. He lived most of his adult life in Vienna, where he established a reputation as an excellent vocal coach and organiser of lecture-recitals and had a lot of very good Jewish singers as pupils. (He married a singer, so like Richard Strauss he had someone on hand to try his vocal music out!).

How has his music fallen so far off the radar? 

I think it must’ve been down to his rather reticent personality, because he certainly didn’t lack talent or connections. There’s no society championing his legacy, as there is with Hans Gál, and believe me I’ve looked! Helmut and I are both mystified by the way his music disappeared from the repertoire, because he really was embedded in the highest echelons of musical Vienna.

In 1897 his Symphony in G minor shared the Beethoven Prize (founded by Brahms) with Zemlinsky’s Symphony in B flat Major, and the composers conducted the premieres at the Vienna Musikverein a couple of years later. (Unfortunately Gund did an extremely good job of destroying the material…I tried the Musikverein library and even talked to his grandson but there’s nothing, not even a short score or parts). 

His songs were published by Universal Edition, he was the archivist of the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein, he taught counterpoint to Alma Mahler and knew Gustav, and was a family friend of Brahms. He effectively had all these musical giants on speed dial: ‘Let’s ask Gustav!’ or ‘What would Johannes say about this?’! 

His adoration of Brahms was partly why he moved to Vienna – he deliberately rented an apartment close to his house, which is a little bit weird! He became Brahms’s unofficial secretary, and I found out through his grandson that they often played the Liebeslieder Walzer together. Brahms was always being asked to play the piano at parties and was usually a bit grumpy about it…he’d say ‘No no, this evening Robert Gund is going to entertain you!’, like he was his adopted son.

Were you able to make contact with any surviving relatives?

I did a lot of genealogical research and discovered that his grandson - also called Robert Gund - is still alive: he celebrated his ninetieth birthday last year and is, like his lovely wife, very spirited. Quite unbelievably, he lives just half an hour away from us in Switzerland. It did feel odd calling him up and saying: ‘May I speak to Robert Gund?’, a bit like saying ‘Hi, is Johannes Brahms there?’!

He invited me over to his house and showed me a lot of memorabilia, including some incredible artwork: Gund always took a sketchbook on his travels, and drew landscapes, buildings, portraits, all sorts. He was friends with the Vienna Secession artist Carl Moll, who was blown away by his drawings of the Beethoven-Häuser when he popped round one day, and used them as the basis for his famous woodcuttings.

What set you on Gund’s trail in the first place?

Helmut came across a book about his Lieder which was written about twenty years ago, and in the back there was a collection of twenty songs – we often get together to explore new repertoire when we’re both in Vienna, so he asked me over to his place to try them out. When we first read through them we thought they were amazing… and they kept on being amazing the more we did them, which isn’t always the case!

Helmut loves them because the writing is quintessentially pianistic, very much in the vein of Schumann, although the composer he reminds me of the most overall is Wolf. We also had enormous fun with 'Die Drei Zigeuner', which is definitely influenced by Brahms’s Austro-Hungarian style; Gund writes in 5/4 in a super-easy way, and Helmut absolutely revelled in the powerful piano writing! 

What’s the story behind your friendship with Helmut?

It goes back twenty-five years, if not longer…When I was studying at the Guildhall in London I had a pianist friend who took Lied coaching with Helmut and needed a singer to take along, so we did Wolf’s 'Der Feuerreiter' in a terrible downstairs studio with an upright piano! But Helmut was so great, and a few years later I plucked up the courage to call him up when I was planning my Modern Times album because I knew he was interested in doing unusual repertoire rather than a 150th Winterreise (although we have since done that together and it was amazing!). He said ‘Ja, warum denn nicht?!’ and that was that. 

We have a shared passion for exploring music that’s off the beaten track; Helmut’s just turned eighty and he’s always turning up with something new to share. And there’s something special about doing world premiere recordings because it’s unknown territory and you need to make the decisions and set the standard. Or at least you hope you do!

Have you had much opportunity to programme the songs in live concerts?

We always do private recitals at Helmut’s home in Vienna before we go public with repertoire – he has an incredible living room, which is large and very stylish! It’s a great way to gauge how an audience responds to the songs because you can see their facial expressions up close, and that reinforced our conviction that Gund is an incredible storyteller. 

For instance, we both loved ‘Schön Rotraut’ but thought it might be a bit on the cute side until we actually performed it; it’s a ballad in the manner of Schumann or Loewe about a king’s daughter who loves hunting and fishing, and takes a shine to a shy boy servant who she takes out riding with her one day. Gund is incredibly talented at doing these little harmonic twists and turns where every word is mirrored by a twinkle in the eye: there’s this ironic thing going on where the princess is much stronger than the suitor and tells him to just kiss her! It's quite radical, and the audience loved it.