San Francisco Classical Voice

Matthias Goerne is not much to look at, and his face when he performs is almost without expression. His baritone voice is grainy and dark and hasn't got the expected singer's resonance and ring. But on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at Herbst theater he put aside vocal opulence like so much unnecessary baggage on an arduous trip and used this stripped-down voice to plumb and reveal the mysteries of some unfamiliar, beautiful songs of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. His companion on the journey, likewise equipped with trim but extraordinarily apt gear, was Eric Schneider.

Illness caused Goerne to curtail his Schubert concert on Thursday, depriving his rapt audience of the last set, four songs to texts of Johann Mayrhofer. This was indeed a deprivation, considering the beauties the two artists had already revealed, especially in a second half that consisted of only five songs, to poems of Friedrich von Schlegel. Two of them, "Der Wanderer"("The Wanderer") and "Im Walde"("In the Forest"), were supreme examples of a favorite Romantic theme: man the wanderer, alone in nature.

The uneven verses of the first song drew inspired writing from Schubert, beginning with the opening lines, "Wie deutlich des Mondes Licht/Zu mir spricht,/Mich beseelend zu der Reise" ("How clearly the moon's light/Speaks to me/Inspiring me to the journey"), where the vocal line is anchored high in the singer's range as if suspended from heaven. Moving slowly, deliberately, with all the time in the world, Goerne and Schneider wove Schubert's magic spell. By the end of the song, as the opening theme returned, no one could move, let alone drop the proverbial pin.

The second song of this pair was like a vision of the forest's inner life: "Windes rauschen, Gottes Flügel/Tief in kühler Waldesnacht" ("Airstreams rushing, God's own pinions/Deep in the cool forest's night"). The piano illustrated lightning flashes, the "rippling of soft waters," and more, while the singer maneuvered his voice adroitly, movingly, through the many shifting moods and images. If any composer present at the time of the Creation could have put music to it, these two would be the artists to perform it.

Earlier on the Schubert program were a group of arioso-like, muscular settings of Friedrich Schiller and a group of more delicate settings to poems of F. G. Klopstock, three love-lyrics to his wife, nicknamed "Cidli", who died only four years after their marriage in 1754. Before intermission came a varied group of settings of poems by Ernst Schulze, dead at 26 of tuberculosis. The exquisite "Im Frühling"("In Spring") was among these, perfectly shaped by both composer and interpreters.

The Schumann concert of two days earlier created the same magic with even fewer familiar songs, many from the period around 1850, when Schumann's creative powers were failing, along with his mind. In these performances, however, the songs seemed to lack for nothing. Goerne and Schneider mined the depths and brought up riches.

Schumann's lieder make more demands on the listeners than do Schubert's, in part because the piano and voice move independently, sometimes mirroring and echoing each other but at other times projecting differing characters. In "Meine Rose"("My Rose"), to a text of Nicholas Lenau, the voice enters in the middle of a lyrical piano thought, which persists in spite of the interruption. After they recapitulate the first stanza, the piano forces the voice to end its part on a false cadence and then completes the song quietly on its own.

In "Der schwere Abend" ("The Oppressive Evening"), the piano repeats a short, sharp, bitter refrain that could have come straight out of the despairing songs of the Dichterliebe. The voice goes its own way, finally picking up the piano mood on the last words, "Wünscht' ich beklümmert beiden/Im Herzen uns den Tod" ("In the anguish of my heart/I wished us both dead"). Goerne sang the last line as if he were biting off the words with his teeth, even as the line quietly descended.

In the last song, "Abendlied" ("Evening Song"), the piano opens with a chorale-like theme that it repeats several times, oblivious of the direction the voice wants to take. Suddenly at the end, voice and piano come together in a simple homophonic motive, as if bringing the weary traveler home to comfort and consolation, showing the rest of the song to have been, by contrast, as unsettling as any 20th century composition. Which was the real Schumann? Was such writing the result of mental decomposition? Goerne and Schneider didn't make it seem so.

Time after time Schumann's assertive piano accompaniments seemed to be saying to the voice: "You may very well believe that, but I have thought longer and deeper about it, and here is what I have to say." Goerne and Schneider were fully alive to this ever-present Schumannesque argument, Schneider an uncannily sensitive partner, muting but not dulling his tone to match Goerne's quiet casting of the songs, even when the piano and voice parts diverged. But their tones always matched and dove-tailed perfectly.

Remarkably, the uniformly deliberate, subdued rendering of the songs did not make for a trying experience. Rather, it allowed the time needed to explore the reasons these two lieder composers are considered supreme: Schumann complex, contrapuntal; Schubert melodic, poignant. In the end, questions had been answered, mysteries had been unlocked, and the unique connection of poetry and music that is the lied had been magnificently affirmed.

(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.)

©2001 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved