David Steinau
Professor of Music
Program Director of GO Austria
Education
DMA, University of Illinois Urbana
MM, New England Conservatory of Music
BM, Northwestern University
Areas of Specialty
Ensembles
Voice
About Me
David Steinau teaches voice and provides musical direction for opera and musical theatre productions with the Department of Theatre. He has also staged Susquehanna’s productions of the operas Gianni Schicchi, Suor Angelica, The Mikado, Street Scene, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Krása’s Brundibár and Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis and conducted Susquehanna’s productions of Sondheim’s Passion and Into the Woods and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. He has led a dozen student trips to Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, as part of Susquehanna’s Global Opportunities program.
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.
His research interests include the music of the composer Hanns Eisler, who was a frequent collaborator of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. He has delivered papers on Eisler and Brecht at numerous conferences in Europe and the United States. He spent a summer as a visiting scholar at Stanford University participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar, which examined the German-speaking artists, including Eisler, who settled in California during World War II.
A performer in opera and concert, he has sung the leading tenor roles in The Barber of Seville, The Magic Flute, Cosi fan tutte, La Boheme, Manon, Die Fledermaus and Albert Herring, among others, and has appeared as a frequent oratorio soloist in the works of Handel, Mozart and Bach. He also 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.
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.
He is a former University Trustee and former Speaker of the Faculty.