Once encountered, Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise haunts many listeners for the rest of their lives. This is certainly true in my case. Perhaps that's because the first time I heard it I started at the top. My father took me to a performance by the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I was hooked. I've heard it two or three dozen times since—and I suspect that Winterreise audiences are full of similar obsessives, permanently lured back by the cycle's unique musical and poetic atmosphere.
Written near the end of Schubert's brief life, Winterreise (Winter's Journey) sets 24 Wilhelm Müller poems on themes of lost love, death and incipient madness. Unified by the metaphor of the poet wandering through the winter landscape to a final resting place, and by an insistent pulse at walking pace in the music, it's widely deemed the pre-eminent song cycle in the repertoire.
So far, so uncontroversial. But there's a problem with the work's eminence. Like Everest, Winterreise is there, so everyone wants to have a go at it—including some who shouldn't. Many opera singers fall into this ill-advised category, unable to scale down their vocal resources for Winterreise's inward drama. The British bass John Tomlinson, who attempted the cycle in 2007, is one example. But there are some great exceptions, like the German bass Hans Hotter and (though not everyone agrees) the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers. One can see why so many try.
This is by no means the first time that Winterreise has been turned into a stage show of some kind. The first time I came across this was when the fine Swedish baritone Håkan Hagegård performed the cycle in America. When the audience entered the concert hall it encountered Hagegård seated pensively in an armchair, dressed in tweeds, as if he was about to take to the road—a bit like a character in a John Buchan novel. When the audience settled, the door opened and Hagegård's pianist entered and sat at the piano. Hagegård then rose and sang each of the 24 songs in a different part of the room—now staring out of the window, now toying with an ornament on the mantelpiece, now gazing at his reflection in a mirror.
Much more ambitious and dramatic than this, although not necessarily more successful, was the English baritone Simon Keenlyside's approach back in 2003. Keenlyside—who had previously performed the cycle in a traditional manner with almost motionless intensity—this time offered a fully choreographed Winterreise by Trisha Brown, in which he moved and posed—accompanied by dancers—in ways that attempted to depict some aspect of each song. Some of these were effective, others not; but the overall effect, while admirable and ingenious in its way, was unsatisfactory. It begged the question: why? It detracted from Schubert's songs rather than enhancing them, I thought. And that's a pretty devastating verdict to reach.
Then there's the question of female Winterreisen. Both Müller and Schubert imagined these poems and songs through the eyes of a man. But does this mean that only men can perform them? I certainly wouldn't argue that women can't or shouldn't sing Winterreise—you only have to listen to nearly 70 years of recordings stretching from Lotte Lehmann through Brigitte Fassbänder to Christine Schäfer (whose account was recently awarded the palm in Radio 3's Building a Library) to make the case unanswerably. And no one who attended Alice Coote's Winterreise in March 2008 is likely to have heard a more on-the-edge version in their lives. Even so, I still think the Winterreise of my dreams focuses on the poems and the songs. It consists of a male singer giving a recital in a small to medium sized hall, accompanied by a pianist, the way I heard Fischer-Dieskau first sing it. That's why, while I am looking forward to hearing Padmore (and who wouldn't), the London Winterreise of Christoph Pregardien on 21st May, for me, was a better fit. In his time, Pregardien has recorded the cycle with a wind band accompaniment—and, as a traditionalist, I have to admit that it is disconcertingly good. This time, I'm glad to say, the tenor was accompanied by only the pianist, just as Schubert first imagined it. Winterreise is good enough to be left alone.
