Schubert: Winterreise

Ian Bostridge

Image from https://www.rsb-online.de/en/artists/ian-bostridge-2/

Over 400 people at Dominion-Chalmers greatly appreciated a performance yesterday of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise by English tenor Ian Bostridge, with Vancouver’s Wenwen Du at the piano.

Poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) lived over almost the same brief period as did Schubert (1797-1828), both epitomize German Romanticism and both poems and music convey an unequalled emotional intensity: Every encounter or mood during the lone traveller’s journey through the dark winter night turns into grief and despair over his unrequited love. The piano plays as strong a part as the vocal score in expressing the melancholic mood or portraying the landscape during the journey. In The stormy morning, e.g., the piano conjures up as much wild weather as it took Debussy to create with a whole orchestra in La mer. Or hear the tears drop in Frozen tears: “Frozen drops fall / from my cheeks: / did I, then, not notice / that I’ve been weeping?”

Bostridge performed Winterreise for the first time in 1994 so he has had plenty of practice. He has recorded it in 2019 (on Pentatone), with Thomas Adès. He also wrote a 500-page book about it, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber & Faber, 2015). From the publisher’s note:

“As he wanders away from the village and into the empty countryside, he experiences a cascade of emotions--loss, grief, anger, and acute loneliness, shot through with only fleeting moments of hope--until the landscape he inhabits becomes one of alienation and despair. … Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work (he has sung it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world's greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert's wanderer our mirror."

No wonder that, throughout, the singer completely embodied the character, in voice and body language. It truly was a memorable experience.

Here is a 5-minute excerpt (the first song, Gute Nacht) from a 2020 performance that conveys the flavour:

An October 12, 2023 interview by Peter Hum in the Ottawa Citizen:

https://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/a-scholar-and-a-singer-acclaimed-tenor-ian-bostridge-feels-totally-free-with-schuberts-winterreise

Kudos to Music & Beyond for providing the audience with a booklet comprising all texts (German/English or German/French); the English translation was by Richard Stokes (2003). Inexplicably, the printed program did not give Wenwen Du credit!