Page 113 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

where I’d be singing it on the coming Friday…in the course of the four-hour car-journey I learned
two songs, and then realised I still had twenty-two more to go!

On the one hand that’s absolutely not the right way to prepare, but on the other it was so
intense and dense that it was a unique experience – for those four or five days I worked from
7AM until 11 at night, studying the score and writing out the text. Right up to the dress-rehearsal
I was still fine-tuning about No. 8 – even today, that particular song is a thorn in my side!

Are there any other notable ‘thorns’ on the journey for you?!

There are stretches of the cycle where one song flows into the next, for instance from Nos. 1 to
5. And then suddenly things become uncomfortable: the songs become shorter (a few are under
a minute) and the shifts in mood are more rapid as everything gets more unhinged. But I think
that’s an inherent part of the structure - sometimes you’re moving forward quite naturally, and
sometimes you get stuck!

I also find the placement of ‘Im Dorfe’ very strange, and it throws up lots of questions: has he
come back to the village which he left, or is it somewhere else altogether? We don’t know, and
that’s what I find so interesting in this cycle: when you ask questions you don’t get an answer,
you just get more questions! It’s really like a journey where you’re standing at a crossroads and
have to make a decision about which direction to take, but every time you’re offered more
branches. I don’t know whether that was consciously done by Schubert or not, but it’s exactly
how you feel when you perform it.

I find this particular cycle endlessly rewarding, because every performance is so dependent on
your own frame of mind that day – maybe you got a bad phone-call, maybe you had a difficult
conversation (or a wonderful conversation), and it all feeds into your Winterreise. There are so
many layers and so many different routes – it IS a journey, an emotional inner journey for the
audience and performers. Each performance can completely switch mood and direction in the
space of a short piano interlude.

Do you have a set back-story for the Winterreise protagonist in terms of who he
is, where he comes from and why the relationship ended?

I try to make it feel different each time, and I think it’s very important. When people ask me
about what I learned from Fischer-Dieskau, that’s what I always come back to: of course I could
say a hundred things about technique and his reputation, but what I found most inspiring was
how he created everything afresh. Whenever he was teaching he’d prepare for days, learning the
music off-copy again so that he knew every detail without needing to use the score. He’d ask so
many questions about harmonies, about the poet’s background and situation, and I think that’s
the sign of a great artist: to dig deep, and not to deliver a performance but to create it from
scratch every time.

And Winterreise is a wonderful work for that. There are a few lines in the early songs about the
situation with the girl, but as the cycle goes on it becomes less clear – we don’t know how they
broke up, if he treated her badly, or if she had someone else…In the end we really don’t know
much about her at all, and that openness is the extraordinary thing about this music. My instinct
is that she broke up with him, but it was the last straw: he’s someone who wants to go into his
inner world and ask questions which society doesn’t ask; he wants to step away from society and
be the outsider, because he’s brave. That’s why he’s so accusatory about the sleeping villagers in