A young man walks away from a house after being rejected in love. He used to be welcome there but now he is leaving; as this is Romanticism, the weather’s bleak and wintry for the occasion. Was he a teacher whose marriage proposal to his charge went nowhere? He is alone now, walking aimlessly, having nowhere to go. There’s a brook, a crow, a graveyard, a weathervane, a fantasy of sunnier times, but no other human for company. The hurdy-gurdy player (Leiermann) he meets at the end could be, alas, death itself.
Probably the best known song cycle of the western classical canon, Schubert’s Winterreise (A Winter Journey; poetry by Wilhelm Müller) has seen countless reinventions and endured most of them admirably well. It has been fully staged and orchestrated for a chamber ensemble (Netia Jones/Hans Zender/Ian Bostridge), divided between three female singers (Toronto’s Collectìf ensemble), multi-mediatized (William Kentridge’s video projections), arranged for singer, puppet, guitar, and piano with animated drawings (Thomas Guthrie), staged with the piano and illustrated backdrops (Ebbe Knudsen), and arranged for a klezmer band (Le Chimera Project with baritone Philippe Sly). It has been sung by baritones (most often), tenors (occasionally), a handful of mezzos, and at least one great soprano (I really liked how it sounded in Adrianne Pieczonka’s rendition back in 2017). In preparation for the concert yesterday, I rewatched William Kentridge’s Aix-en-Provence Winterreise, a baritone-piano performance to which he added, through his signature animated drawings and collages, the autofictional story of an artist William Kentridge in a wind-swept Johannesburg, struggling with the memory of love of two women. It doesn’t sound like it should work, but it worked remarkably well.
People keep finding unexpected stuff in the cycle. Slavoj Zizek found in it the First World War soldiers traipsing through desolate European scenery - which was to come some hundred years later. That was one of the reasons for its enduring popularity, apparently; this Teutonic war pride. In this story of a depressed lad who’s probably never kissed a woman? OK, Zizek.
Given what Winterreise endured while still remaining Winterreise, I thought the arrangement that adds a SATB chamber choir to the baritone-piano duo sounded fairly reasonable. The Toronto Mendelssohn Singers, the chamber core of the much larger Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, was on splendid form last night, alongside its music director Jean-Sébastien Vallée, baritone Brett Polegato and pianist Philip Chiu. The performers weren’t the issue at all. It was the 2017 arrangement by German choral conductor and composer Gregor Meyer that made me realize that Winterreise can’t withstand every intervention after all. Meyer’s polyphonic journey is perhaps legitimate in its own right, but it’s a very different thing from Schubert’s Winterreise.
First off, the intimacy is gone, and with it much of the variety in the dynamic and inflection in soloist’s singing. The soloist has to keep his expression at forte at all times that the overlap and dialogue with the choir take place, and this exchange takes place in all but perhaps two songs. The narrator/singer is not alone any more. Who are the choir? His inner demons? They sound too elegant and solemn to be anyone’s demons, inner or otherwise. Are they the Greek chorus? Are they the small town vox? Meyer has the choir repeating what the soloist has already sung or anticipating what he is about to say, and other times he gives each different lines of the lyrics. This division of labour comes across as arbitrary. Why are some lines dumbly echoed by the choir? Why does the choir in some cases replace the instrumental accompaniment, effectively silencing the piano too and taking its music? And do we really need the choir illustrating what the wind sounds like?
Musically it’s all pleasant enough and often beautiful, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
By third or fourth song, the choir establishes itself as this meddlesome, Statler and Waldorf presence that you feel is commenting on the narrator’s thought process. Even while he sings of Einsamkeit completely solo (finally), there are 20+ well-dressed people behind him waiting to sing the next one.
Existentially, too, the narrator is not alone any more. He’s in a conversation. While the actual Winterreise narrator is unimaginably lonely.
I’ve been listening to the Leipzig Vocal Consort recording of the Meyer version—there are two recordings available, the Leipzig one with the piano, and the GewandhausChor version with two accordions, and you can listen to them both for free in the Naxos Music Library—but my impression has not changed. It’s like something pulled out of the most solemn of Brahms. The baritone sounds pissed off, not devastated. He sounds like an Old Testament prophet, yelling at the clouds, or his inner demons, same difference - not like a shattered poetic soul. Winterreise works with all manner of visuals and instruments, but the singing voice must remain solo. No chorus, no corps de ballet; only the man and his words into silence.
Photos are by Taylor Long/TMC
Thanks for this - inspired me to listen to a version that came up on YouTube (Jonas Kaufman). The late BC poet Peter Culley has a great poem also called “Winterreise” in his 1995 collection _The Climax Forest_, which ends with these amazing lines: “from the narrow window/Friedrich’s Christ/just barely visible/on his mountaintop, still/writhing in the warm searchlight/of late summer” — I saw that Caspar David Friedrich painting, The Tetachen Altar, in the Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, in 2022. Thanks, too for the Zizek quip I will have to hunt it down. He does write that he imagines Hans Hotter’s 1942 recording being listened to by German troops at the Battle of Stalingrad. “Die Füße frugen nicht nach Rast,/es war zu kalt zum Stehen„