Part 3: Joseph Schmidt, a Star Fell!

ABC Radio National producer Natalie Kestecher visited the Eschenberg Observatory in Switzerland in September 2009 and coducted an interview with Markus Giesser, the Director of the Observatory, who – together with Freimut Börngen, the first discoverer  – named the Joseph Schmidt Asteroid.

ABC Radio National from Australia broadcasted on Saturday, 15 January 2011, the program “A Star Fell – Remembering Joseph Schmidt”, which won a silver medal in the Best Music Special category of the New York Radio Awards.

ABC Radio National: “In this moving account of his life, we hear the songs immortalised by Joseph Schmidt’s voice, as producer Natalie Kestecher searches the archives and the recollections of those old enough to remember. Natalie takes us to a Sydney hospital ward where a former Vienna Mozart choir boy (Erich Troyna) recalls a live radio performance in 1935, and to Switzerland where an astronomer (Markus Griesser) has kept Schmidt’s memory alive by naming an asteroid after him. There too, she visits the Joseph Schmidt archive, lovingly curated by his biographer Alfred Fassbind, a former tenor himself.”