A new recording of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle by a promising young American baritone arrived this week. I had to take it out of the CD player only a few minutes in, because he had no idea what he was singing.
I’m using this snow day as an excuse to revisit one of the more masterful performances, and consider how, in a world obsessed with everything youthful, nothing beats the accumulation of experience in interpreting certain pieces of music.
It doesn’t seem fair to say this about Winterreise on the surface, because Schubert was only 30 when he wrote it. But he was also only a year away from death in 1828. He had lived, felt and figured out how to express more in his short life than several dozen ordinary lives put together.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded the song cycle several times over his lifetime, always finding that there was that extra little bit of something he might be able to better express.
The joys and pitfalls of the incredible set of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller set to music are so nicely expressed in this roughly edited visit with tenor Peter Pears and his accompanist, Benjamin Britten. Pears speaks of the content of the songs being like a “psychologist’s handbook.” Britten marvels at how much Schubert can say with very few notes:
Here is Fischer-Dieskau, recording with Alfred Brendel in 1986, to give us the full dramatic arc. You can follow along on Schubert’s original manuscript score here.
John Terauds