Alfred Wolfsohn

Who was Alfred Wolfsohn?

Alfred Wolfsohn was a German singing teacher. He taught Charlotte Salomon and figures in her paintings as Amadeus Daberlohn.

He was the founder of a special style of voice training today known as the Roy Hart Theatre approach. His experiences of the cries of dying soldiers during World War I substantiated his intuitions and experiences of singing as expression of the whole human being, rather than singing compartmentalised into the separate categories of Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass. These intuitive thoughts led him to explore the nature and possibilities of what he termed as the Human Voice, as opposed to the specialised voice. Later his disgust at the artificially broadcast voices heard everywhere in Hitler's Berlin and his horror at the darkest manifestations of humanity perpetrated by the Nazis further provoked his research. A pioneer in the realms of voice research, his avant-garde studies revealed the potential of the voice as not only an instrument of artistic expression but also of human development and therapy. Wolfsohn's goal was to develop an unchained voice which he called The Voice of the Future.