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RECITAL REVIEW
October 25, 2004
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By Stephanie Friedman
The Romantic hero in Wilhelm Müller's poetic cycle, Die Winterreise, like many so many other Romantic heros of the 19th century, is not a particularly likable fellow. He suffers mightily, and he talks a lot about it. He shuns society, from which he feels alienated by virtue of his surpassing sensitivity. He feels a greater kinship with nature than with his fellow human beings. Why should we want to spend well over an hour in his company? The answer is Franz Schubert, who seized on Müller's creation gratefully, seeing in him a means to fathom his own deep caverns of suffering and creativity — Schubert and, it must be said, artists of the calibre of Ian Bostridge, tenor, and Leif Ove Andsnes, piano, who presented a heart-scouring performance of Schubert's late cycle, Winterreise (Winter Journey), in Herbst Theatre last Monday night.
Although the cycle is called a “journey,” which usually has a beginning, middle, and an end, Winterreise is more about winter than the journey, and more about the protagonist's internal “weather” than the external manifestations of the season. The cycle has no plot. It opens with a somewhat lethargic traipse out of the town where the protagonist's beloved has, probably under the influence of her mother, rejected the “hero” and chosen to marry a wealthier suitor. “Gute Nacht” (Good Night) sets the scene in a sombre narrative by the jilted lover, giving the sketchiest of biographical detail, and puts the man, albeit in a slow, trudging tempo, on his feet, so to speak.
With the second song, “Die Wetterfahne” (The Weather Vane), the journey comes to an sudden halt, as the lover watches the weather vane on top of his beloved's house spin around and around in the wind, and likens the vane to love's (and his beloved's) fickleness. He says he should have noticed the weather vane sooner; he would never have expected to find a faithful woman living in the house beneath it. But why should those within take notice of my torment? he says: their daughter is a rich bride.
Bostridge established with this song the biting ironic tone that runs through the cycle, spitting out “reiche Braut” (rich bride) as if it were poison on his tongue. He could have chosen other interpretations — sadness, longing, self-pity — but bitter, ironic anger suited Bostridge admirably and he used it over and over again, harrowing the listener with each outburst. In one of the harshest ironies of all in the cycle, the lover's hot tears freeze on his cheeks (“Gefrorne Träne” — Frozen Tears) or are quickly absorbed into the snow, in “Wasserflut” (Flood): “Seine kalten Flocken saugen / Durstig ein das heisse Weh” (the cold flakes eagerly / suck in my burning grief”).
This is truly a man rejected by everything, whose very grief vanishes from the world without a trace — rejected, even by himself: in a paroxysm of self-hatred, Bostridge spat out the word “Geselle” (friend) in the famous “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree). In the line spoken by the tree itself, “Komm her zu mir, Geselle / Hier findst du deine Ruh!” (Come to me, friend, here you shall find rest!), Bostridge's interpretation made it clear that the lover would find no rest in the tree's shade now, though he had done so in a happier past. The final irony is almost a cruel joke. The journey comes to another halt (who's to say if it's the final one?) in a town where the lover/poet/singer finds his strange “doppelgänger,” a hurdy-gurdy beggar-man, unnoticed by everyone except the dogs that snarl around him, his begging-plate forever empty. The lover's journey dwindles to a raggedy thread of existence; his poems become grist for an ancient instrument that goes round and round incessantly. The piano, as usual in the Lied, plays no small part in the achievement of Schubert's intentions. Andsnes' piano mined the musical and textual thoughts as bravely and eloquently as did the singer's voice. The staccato accompaniment that introduces “Auf dem Flusse” (On the River) was like dry ice, dangerous and burning to the touch. The hollow bravado of the singer in “Mut” (Courage) was met with a passionately mocking piano. In “Letzte Hoffnung” (Last Hope), both singer and pianist reveled in the unsettling effect of the key and rhythmic instability, so pronounced as to approach a portrait of madness, as the lover watches the last remaining leaf on a tree and knows that its fall will mean the grave of all his hopes.
Andsnes continued his own pianistic touches of irony with a precise pointing of the mocking-bird theme in the accompaniment to “Frühlingstraum” (Dream of Spring). Usually this song is the occasion for a brief episode of light-heartedness, but in the hands of these two performers, who drove a kind of manic tempo, the futility of this dream was all too clear. There are far, far too many wonderful interpretive glories from this pair to permit mention in a single review. It will have to do, simply to say that in every way — dress (gloomy, dark suits with informal white shirts), appearance (Bostridge, singing through a bad cold, looked pallid and cavernous in the stage light, his eyes all but invisible), and by means of the vividly colored, histrionically rich palette each performer had at his command, this performance must take its place among the many possible important, insightful performances of Schubert's profoundly disturbing work. Their interpretation stood out for its focus on the extremes of emotion rather than, perhaps, on a well-shaped picture of this particular tortured Romantic hero. But the presentation of Bostridge and Andsnes is nonetheless memorable, and it will linger, with all its depiction of unending grief, in the mind's eye and ear.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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Ian Bostridge
Leif Ove Andsnes