Page 130 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

27 February 2022

How do you stage Schubert up a mountain?

Director John Bridcut describes filming the epic song cycle ‘Winterreise’ in -14°C in the Swiss Alps

By John Bridcut

Baritone Benjamin Appl outside the Julier Tower CREDIT: BBC Four

“It’s a Tardis!” was my immediate reaction when I first saw an arresting image of the Julier
Tower in the Swiss Alps. This was not the famous blue police call-box, but a huge 10-sided sentinel,
glowing red – an equally incongruous intruder in an ancient alpine landscape.
It seemed to defy the normal rules of time and space. So, when the baritone Benjamin Appl
suggested this extraordinary theatre as the perfect venue to film Winterreise (Franz Schubert’s
introspective song cycle about a young man wandering on a winter journey through the snow,
failing to forget his lost love), his idea immediately clicked.
The Tower would be a place of refuge, but also of entrapment – and a totem of the timelessness of
Schubert’s music. The singer could wander distractedly in the wintry wilderness surrounding it.
We now had a rare chance to do for music what television should: take it away from the stage or
concert hall and reinterpret it for the screen in three dimensions – four, if you include time.

It was decades ago that cinema redefined drama for the screen, but even today television seldom
finds a new visual language for classical music. The few examples include Holocaust, James Kent’s
2005 film of music from Auschwitz; Dominic Best’s recent film of The Turn of the Screw using all
the space in an empty Wilton’s Music Hall; and Young Men, the Ballet Boyz production about
the First World War created for the stage, but danced for the screen in deep French mud.