I first encountered Winterreise as a child, long before I had learned any
German, and the impression it made was such that I listened to it many
times without bothering about the text. When I had saved up enough pocket
money to buy the record, it was an early DFD/Moore performance published in
the UK on the HMV label. Unfortunately it did not supply the text, either
in German or in English, only an English synopsis of each song. Only
mildly disappointed about that at the time, I nevertheless in later years
came to study the German text and the English translation (partly so as to
be able to study Winterreise with my singing-teacher), by which time the
Schubert was so embedded that the Muller was for me little more than a
commentary on the music which was already in my heart. That is partly why
I found Mr Peters' recent exegesis on the text so interesting. I had never
really concerned myself with the details of the "plot" in the picaresque
sense, the journey being for me far more one of the soul than of the body.
I very much hope he will give us his meditations on the other songs in due
course.
Because that early recording was such a source of beauty and deep solace
during an unhappy and dysfunctional childhood ("In wieviel grauen Stunden
..." etc.) I am quite unable to attempt a dispassionate critique of the
performance. I would like to write, however, briefly in praise of the
Britten/Pears recording. The way two such very British gentlemen manage
to get right under the German skin of the piece is most impressive. Very
few non-Germans have been able to do it. One of the high points of this
performance comes in 'Rast', where on the words "fuhlst in der Still erst
deinen Wurm mit heissem Stich sich regen!" the voice of Pears embodies in
his incomparable way the intense torture of the serpent's tooth. It is the
same quality that he displays, for example, at the very end of the Agnus
Dei in his War Requiem recording. No-one else I have heard matches him in
this. YMMV.
To get back to "Gute Nacht", it is in the last verse (how strange the
change from minor to major, every time we say goodbye!) that Gerald Moore
believes that we come to the moment of truth. Moore writes,
"It would be better for the lover and his equilibrium if he could
depart without so much as a backward glance at her window. Were he
able thus to harden his heart there would be no Winter's Journey, no
suffering and tears, no storms, no cruel dreams and torturing fantasies:
there would be no mental collapse. Alas, he knows with all his soul
that he loves her, will never be able to forget her. This is the
cycle's raison d'etre and why I call this verse the moment of truth."
The "truth", as I see it, is the realisation of his utter social isolation.
Whoever said that hell is other people had it totally wrong. Hell is no
other people. Hell is isolation from God and from man. This can drive
men to enlightenment - or to madness. That was of course a common theme
in the 19th C. Compare George Crabbe's Peter Grimes, George Eliot's Silas
Marner; many lieder by Schubert and Schumann with words like sehnsucht and
einsamkeit (even schone einsamkeit is still einsamkeit); and the strange
Goethe character in Brahms' Alto Rhapsody, the man who though surrounded
by love drank only the bitter cup of hatred, and hides himself away in the
thicket.
It still seems to me that this is a subject that we are rarely able to
address these days. Unwilling to contemplate the abyss, we turn back from
the edge or else - as they did at Babi Yar - we fill it in and pretend it's
not there. As it happens, a little while ago I was in the audience at a
Lieder masterclass (given by Barbara Bonney). During a Q&A session I made
a similar point about what could be expressed in lieder, but there was no
great measure of support for the proposition. So maybe I'm wrong. But I
think that Winterreise deals with what is now pretty much in my perception
a taboo subject. Which gives Winterreise in all its profundity a
peculiarly contemporary importance and relevance.
Alan Moss
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