San Francisco Classical Voice

Franz Schubert was to have only one more year of life when he composed the Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), surely one of the bleakest, most harrowing of all song cycles, as difficult to listen to as to perform. The outer landscape mirrors the rejected lover's inward progress towards death. Twenty-four songs cumulatively batter the soul of listener and performer, until there is nothing left at the end but a devastated, shrunken vista, culminating in the figure of the organ-grinder.

The problem of mechanics in performing the cycle is easily met: no intermission, about an hour and a quarter of nonstop singing and playing. How to set the stage and draw the audience into this difficult experience is another problem, which Håken Hagegård, baritone and Warren Jones, piano handled with mesmerizing focus: they simply walked unobtrusively onstage about ten minutes before the concert began at Herbst Theater last Sunday evening, sat down, respectively, in a tall, red upholstered chair stage right and at the piano, and began silently to enter the life of the songs. As audience members were seated, they began to sense the need of preparation of their own and grew quiet. At the appropriate time, the lights lowered and Jones began to play the first song. The journey had begun.

It is difficult to review this concert in the ordinary way. To say that Hagegård had some hoarse pitches and chopped out some of the words, or that Jones is one of the best accompanying pianists alive today, is hardly to describe the experience. Just as difficult is to talk about some of the songs but not all of them, so seamless and interlocking is the cycle.

Hagegård eschewed his much admired mellifluous quality, instead using very little of his voice much of the time, except for sudden, bitter outbursts. Jones allowed himself the same sudden swerves of dynamics, responding, leading, darting in and around the singer. Abrupt shifts between loud (storms, despair) and soft (weariness, depression) served the songs well, as did frequent use of rubato. Responses to the varied and changing emotions in the songs were hair-trigger, almost frightening. Pianist and singer were doing more than talking to each other. They were consoling, warning, sympathizing, even feeling complicit rage, as very good friends do.

At times the songs took on an almost hysterical edge. In "Erstarrung" ("Numbness"), irregular lines in voice and piano chased each other around, doubling back on themselves as if trying to understand what had gone wrong, unable to escape the constant self-flagellation of the jilted lover. In "Rückblick" ("Backward Glance"), Hagegard punched his words out bitterly (no bel canto here!) while Schubert's magnificent long lines pursued one another back and forth between singer and pianist, caught in the lover's inability to keep his mind from returning to that day and that place where he first saw his beloved.

Time and again the responsive piano, commenting on weather or mental state, suddenly burst out to follow the singer once more into uncontrollable bitterness, then fell back, calming itself and the singer, saying, yes, yes, I know, I feel as you do, but that way madness lies. Be still, be still.

There were no light moments without dark commentary. "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Linden Tree"), one of the most beautiful, soul-stirring songs ever written, is gentle and consoling only until the sudden storm disrupts the singer's memory, making him realize how distant in every way he is from the comforting tree. "Du fändest Ruhe dort," says the tree: you would have found peace there, but now it is too late.

The lively "Die Post" ("The Post"), with its galloping hoofbeats, was in Jones' hands light, agitated, frenzied, reflecting the singer's knowledge that there could be no letter from his beloved from this post or any other. Hagegård addressed his heart like a beloved, wayward object: Why do you leap at the sound of the posthorn when there is no hope? Do you, he sang gently, perhaps want to peek once more at the town (where the beloved lives) and see how things are going?

After this, the faithless girl is no longer mentioned. The theme is death, longed for but elusive. The images are wonderful: The crow ("Die Krähe"), who endlessly circles the lover's head. The graveyard in "Das Wirtshaus," where he seeks "a room at the inn" but finds that the inn is full. His own unbearably black hair, taunting him with its youthful vigor as the white frost that covered it melts. And the road marker ("Der Wegweiser"), pointing his way to death. All of these images were powerfully etched by the performers.

While singing the last verse of the penultimate song, Hagegård crossed the stage to the chair and sat down again. Jones almost immediately began the stark concluding song, "Der Leiermann" ("The Organ-Grinder") and miraculously became both the old man grinding out his tunes and the singer, with a feeble drone and strum depicting the old man, and an agonized reach for the final octave leap describing the lover's last agony, falling back, exhausted.

Hagegård sat frozen-faced, enervated, as this winter's tale ended, lifting his body up out of the chair for one last echo of all the previous outcries -- a heart-wrenching crescendo on the final word, "drehn" ("grind"), as he asks the strange outcast to play the accompaniment for his songs on the hurdy-gurdy. Then utter collapse of both singer and pianist, who remained frozen in position, Jones with his hands still on the keyboard, Hagegård crumpled in his upright chair. No one uttered a sound.

(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. )

©2000 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved