Page 68 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22
P. 68
20 January 2022
ARTS ENTERTAINMENT PERFORMING ARTS
Franz Schubert’s tragic ‘Winterreise’ comes to Moody Performance Hall
Baritone Benjamin Appl will perform the song cycle about lost love and sad wanderings.
German baritone Benjamin Appl (lars borges)
By Scott Cantrell
The usual audience response at the end of Franz Schubert’s hourlong song cycle Winterreise (Winter
Journey) is stunned silence — then amazement at having experienced something special. Setting 24
poems by the German writer Wilhelm Müller, rarely performed around here, the songs imagine sad
wintry wanderings of a young man whose beloved has rejected him.
Schubert was unlucky in love, so these texts would have had special resonance for him. He was also
shadowed by bouts of the illness — probably syphilis — soon to end his own earthly journey.
Schubert would be dead a year later, at age 31 — earlier even than Mozart.
Who will perform it: German baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu, in the Dallas
Opera’s Titus Family Recital Series. The cycle will be sung in the original German, with printed
translations. Appl is a protégé of the late German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, one of the most
famous interpreters of German lieder (art songs).
About the work: No composer had a finer gift of melody than Schubert, and it suffuses this cycle,
meant to be performed without interruption. The songs are not uniformly sad — happy memories
and flashes of (ill-starred) hope appear here and there — but ultimately they confront lovesickness
and loneliness.
