The release of Ian Bostridge's and Lars Vogt's CD of Franz Schubert's Schwanengesang and ‘Einsamkeit’, D. 620, on 25 September 2022, was tinged by a sense of untimeliness, for Vogt had passed away earlier that month, just shy of 52. The occasion of Vogt's passing and the repertoire recorded bring to mind not only Schubert's death at the tender age of 31, but also those of his poets: Wilhelm Müller, who penned Winterreise, died in 1827, the year before Schubert, and Johann Mayrhofer, the author of ‘Einsamkeit’, died by suicide barely a decade later at age 48. Pondering the issue of timeliness, the literary critic Edward Said observed that if death is expected to follow old age, that is, ‘the last or late period of life’, then the untimeliness of ‘the onset of ill health or other factors … in a younger person’ remind us of the connection between timeliness and lateness, both of which have saturated some of the most recent Schubert scholarship.Footnote 1 With these themes of timeliness and lateness in mind, listeners might be inclined to retrospectively hear this recording of Schubert's ‘swan songs’ as a musical valediction by Vogt. On the other hand, for Bostridge, who has made a career out of performing Schubert Lieder, it would be premature to say that his singing has developed into its own ‘late style’, but this CD demonstrates that his interpretation has, of course, changed over the span of over 30 years. So, too, does Bostridge offer another rich re-interpretation of Winterreise in his third recording of the winter journey, this time with the composer Thomas Adès at the piano (Pentatone, 2019).Footnote 2 Through the themes of timeliness and lateness, this review of the CDs of Winterreise, Schwanengesang and ‘Einsamkeit’ with Bostridge/Adès and Bostridge/Vogt highlights the most potent aspects of their interpretations that draw out the darker side of these songs. Bostridge's most recent approach to these Lieder demonstrates his willingness to embrace the full breadth of his vocality, including non-classical approaches, to exploit the grimmer elements of Schubert's late Lieder. Furthermore, the contributions of his collaborators – Adès via his perspective as a composer, and Vogt for his powerful range of expression and sensitivity to detail – realize the poetic essence of the texts and mine Romantic themes that pervade Schubert's cycles. These CDs make a welcome addition to the existing collection of this oft-recorded repertoire, for the performers demonstrate the range of interpretive choices that still exist and give new meaning to these timeless cycles.
Beginning with Winterreise, Bostridge pushes his daring and genre-crossing vocal techniques even further in this recording with Adès than in his previous CD with Andsnes.Footnote 3 The tenor brings his commitment to a dramatic interpretation to bear on the poetry's demands with chilling effect. ‘Die Krähe’ stands out as a particularly impressive instance where Bostridge's and Adès's re-imagining of the song proves transformative. He and Adès take the song at a hypnotically slow pace – markedly slower than in the singer's previous recordings with Drake and Andsnes. At this tempo, Bostridge's fantastic breath control helps convey the wanderer's weary resoluteness towards the goal of the second half of the cycle: death. His vocal lines, like the bird's wings gliding silently through the air, stretch out smoothly into the ether: entrances on vowels and phrase conclusions on nasal consonants (‘-en’ verb endings) merge seamlessly with the accompaniment. At the same time, Adès doubles the vocal line at a mesmerizing piano dynamic, sonically concretizing the image of the crow – an omen of death – ‘flying ceaselessly around my [the wanderer's] head’.
In ‘Die Krähe’ and other songs from Winterreise and Schwanengesang that deal with gothic themes or subjects (‘Der Doppelgänger’ poses an excellent example), Bostridge's tone acquires a steeliness that becomes all the more disquieting when he emphasizes certain words through nonvibrato. In ‘Die Krähe’, he sings the first syllable of ‘wunderliches Tier’ and the second of ‘endlich’ straight as he enjoins the crow to stay with him. While this technique – or the deliberate withholding of vibrato – might seem counterintuitive to musical expression, Bostridge's choice to withhold the warmth of vibrato emphasizes the macabre elements of the cycle. In an audible departure from his earlier recordings, Bostridge employs spine-tingling vocal scoops on ‘Beute’ and ‘Leib’ when asking the crow whether it will soon feast on his body as prey. Although some may hear Bostridge's penchant for vocal slides as ‘corrupting’ or ‘sentimentalizing’, the way in which he unsettles the space between the notated pitches presciently worries the wanderer's precarious state of existence: as an outcast, his entire being is characterized by liminality and represents the condition of the myriad wanderers and politically alienated in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.Footnote 4
‘Die Krähe’, among other songs on this CD, also demonstrates another of Bostridge's idiosyncratic vocal techniques borrowed from popular styles of singing: growling. The gravelly quality of his lower range and the crudeness with which he utters the word ‘Krähe’ in the last address to the crow draws out the gruesome irony of what it would mean to ‘behold fidelity to the grave’. Bostridge's extended colour palette, heightened through his eclectic vocal technique, brings out the ironies and complexities in Müller's poetry, which has historically been dismissed as second-rate. Having performed Winterreise for over 30 years, Bostridge fully embraces the darker elements of the cycle in this later stage of his career. His unabashed display of the grotesquerie involved in the wanderer's mediations on death appropriately calls to mind Adorno's declaration that ‘in the history of art, late works are the catastrophes’.Footnote 5 Probing the darkest shadows of the cycle – its abject gloom, emotional distress, and acerbic irony – Bostridge convincingly shows that singing late works requires an eclectic approach to vocality that explores the voice's grains and rough edges in order to shed light on the ‘chasms and shafts’ and ‘chthonic depths’ of Schubert's ‘fractured landscape’.Footnote 6
On the other end of the spectrum, even when Bostridge sings in a restrained manner, his shifts of timbre adroitly plumb the psychological depths of the cycle. As Blake Howe notices in Bostridge's recording of Winterreise with Andsnes, in ‘Wasserflut’, ‘Auf dem Flusse’ and other songs, Bostridge exploits his ability to sing softly in his upper register to great effect, for his voice's ethereal sheen betrays the wanderer's emotional vulnerability when he becomes preoccupied with existential matters.Footnote 7 Moreover, Adès's dramaticization of the piano's dynamic range both mirrors the fragility of the wanderer's psyche and betrays the his true emotions, even before he divulges them. In ‘Auf dem Flusse’, pianissimo staccato quavers in the piano introduction convey the image of the frozen river and the wanderer's numb state, while the violent surges in bars 47 and 60–61 announce the intensity of the protagonist's grief before he declares the likeness of his heart to the ‘seething torrent’.
Indeed, Adès's perspective as a composer makes his role as a collaborator particularly valuable in this recording and in this song: Bostridge recounts in an interview that Adès's interpretive choices include not only exaggerating dynamics, but also altering notes and rhythms in the printed Urtext edition by the Neue Schubert Ausgabe to reflect the autograph manuscript of the cycle.Footnote 8 Held at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and digitized online, the autograph manuscript of Part I of Winterreise shows that Schubert heavily reworked parts of ‘Auf dem Flusse’. Deciphering Schubert's markings has led to considerable debate over the thorny question of the composer's intentions, and Adès has contributed his own musical response – one that favours the autograph. One of the points of contention regarding Schubert's wishes in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ concerns the harmony in bar 47: As Julian Armitage-Smith observes, discrepancies between the autograph and the first edition result in a change of the spelling of the chord on the first beat of the bar: The autograph indicates a D-sharp dominant-seventh chord, while the first edition and Urtext edition by the Neue Schubert Ausgabe indicate a D-sharp minor chord.Footnote 9 Although Drake and Andsnes play the chord as printed, Adès plays it as notated in the manuscript, what Armitage-Smith believes to be the composer's ‘true intention’. Adès's decision, reflective of his desire to adhere to the most direct source transmitted by the composer, strengthens the sharp harmonic turn to G-sharp minor in bar 48. The second alteration Adès makes with respect to the autograph concerns bars 62–65, where Schubert originally double-dotted the quavers in the bassline, but where the engraver's copy omits the second dot. Adés's emphasis of the bassline rhythm creates more forward momentum, and together with the harmonic intensification in bar 47, sonically reinforces the emotional tumult in the poem. The corresponding text to these moments in the song suddenly reveals the wanderer's anguish, which he likens to the ‘seething torrent’ underneath the frozen river's ‘hard, rigid crust’ of ice. Adés's interpretive choices based, on his scrupulous attention to the manuscript, make this recording an important contribution: to my knowledge, no other recording of Winterreise emends this song to match the autograph's notation. As thorny as the question of the ‘composer's intention’ is, Adés's interpretation – no doubt informed by his own background as a composer – allows the listener a glimpse into the artist's workshop, so to speak, for the rhythms and notes that he plays must have existed in different variations of the song that transpired during various stages of the compositional process.
Moving on to Schubert's ‘swan song’, the collection of Lieder we now call Schwanengesang was given its title by the publisher Tobias Haslinger.Footnote 10 Marketed by him as Schubert's last work, Schwanengesang has projected since 1828 an aura of lateness. Comprising fourteen Lieder – seven by Ludwig Rellstab, six by Heinrich Heine, and one by Gabriel Seidl – the work is not a cycle in a true sense, for the songs do not tell a story in the way that Schubert's song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, do. To further complicate the notion of cyclicity, not only does Schubert draw upon three different textual sources, but he also presents the Heine songs in a different order than they appear in Heine's Buch der Lieder: the original sequence of the Heine poems implies a storyline that is obscured and fragmented in Schubert's setting.Footnote 11
Even though Schwanengesang is not a proper song cycle, Vogt's attentive and bold pianism creates implicit linkages between the songs and plays a crucial role in realizing the crux of the Heine poems. His deliberate dotted rhythms in ‘Aufenthalt’, ‘Der Atlas’ and ‘Die Stadt’ enhance the drama and lend subtle rhythmic coherence to the otherwise unrelated songs as the protagonist tells of his unabated grief in ‘Aufenthalt’, the inexorable travails of ‘Der Atlas’ and his disquietude as he returns to ‘that place where I lost what I loved most’ (‘Die Stadt’). In ‘Der Atlas’, Vogt's scintillating tremolos not only provide direction in the transitions into and out of the contrasting middle section, but also convey the explosive power of Atlas's unfettered angst. Again in ‘Die Stadt’, Vogt's tremolos and intense dynamics help communicate crucial poetic meaning. In the last line, ‘wo ich das Liebste verlor’, Bostridge spits out ‘verlor’ with shockingly bitter vehemence as another quaking tremolo erupts from the piano. Here, as in the last line of ‘Ihr Bild’, Bostridge's acerbic consonants and Vogt's dynamic intensity expresses the full tragedy of the verb's meaning and the shock of the knife's twist for which Heine's poetry is so well known.
Further probing the problem of cyclicity, themes common to the different texts of Schwanengesang nevertheless hint at a greater level of unity; one important motif includes the idea of home. The juxtaposition of the penultimate song of the cycle, ‘Der Doppelgänger’, with the final Lied, ‘Die Taubenpost’, explores the full range of the word's implications. In the last Heine song, the drama unfolds in front of the beloved's vacant house, whereas in the Seidl Lied, the sweetheart's house is the pigeon's destination and the singer's object of desire. Bostridge's attention to the text and catholic vocal technique, as well as Vogt's articulation, explore the valences of time and (un)timeliness in these songs.
In ‘Der Doppelgänger’, the word ‘Haus’ appears twice in the first stanza that sets the scene: the protagonist is compelled by the torment of love (Liebeslied) to return to the beloved's home, which she has long vacated. As he observes that his former lover's house still occupies the same spot it did many years ago (‘auf demselben Platz’), Bostridge scoops upwards from F-sharp to A on the second syllable of ‘demselben’. While unconventional, the distortion of the word emphasizes the house as the site where the past and present, absence and presence, longing and frustration, and love and loss converge in an eerie and unanticipated manner. Bostridge's emphasis on the word calls attention to the house's timelessness and the narrator's untimeliness: while the memory of the loved one and the building, which serves as a token thereof, have endured over the years, the narrator's return proves too late, for she forsook the town many years ago. The coldness of Bostridge's non-vibrato voice and his judicious ‘bending [of] melody to words’ convincingly expresses the uncanny (unheimlich) quality of the narrated scene without sounding mannered.Footnote 12 This interpretive choice demonstrates the singer's belief, as is audible in both CDs, that the worlds of ‘classical song and popular song should not be so far apart’.
At the same time that Bostridge's vocality highlights the disturbing convergence of past and present, Vogt's articulation of the repeating ground bass helps delineate the three temporal levels in Heine's poem. In Bostridge's previous recording with Antonio Pappano, the pianist connects each iteration of the harmonic progression, creating a sense of inevitability. On the other hand, Vogt inserts small breaks between repetitions of the ostinato. The first comes after the piano introduction, as if anticipating the coming story with foreboding. The subsequent pauses, before the voice's second and third entrances in bars 15 and 25, respectively, subtly demarcate the long distant past from the more recent past and the present; Vogt's spacings help clarify the text's shifts from the preterit (‘In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz’) to the perfect past tense (‘Sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen’), and finally, to the present tense (‘Da steht auch ein Mensch’). His most crucial separation between restatements of the four-bar pattern occurs between bars 42 and 43, where Heine's poem changes perspective from the third person to a direct address to the doppelgänger.
In the following song, ‘Die Taubenpost’, the associations with home shed their haunting qualities; instead, the sweet image of the pigeon secretly observing the sweetheart through the window reaffirms the connections between home, love, and desire intertwined throughout the fourteen songs. And indeed, the modal turn from G major to the parallel minor on the word ‘heimlich’ emphasizes the narrator's yearning (Sehnsucht) for the beloved, symbolized by the bird ‘whose name is Longing’, ‘the messenger of faithfulness’. Here, Bostridge sings the mordent preceding ‘heimlich’ straight, emphasizing the earnestness, even naivety, of the lover. Whereas he employed non-vibrato to draw out the unnaturalness of the ghostly double, in ‘Die Taubenpost’ and other songs, he also uses it to different ends: One fleeting but notable example occurs in Rellstab's ‘Abschied’, where Bostridge accentuates ‘hier’ in the penultimate stanza to stress that the protagonist ‘cannot linger’ by the beloved's window but must ‘ride on’, implying the restless nature of the archetypal wanderer who never finds home.
Bostridge's scrupulous attention to the poetry throughout Schwanengesang pays rich dividends to the listener: while the succession from the painful intensity of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ to the upbeat tempo and cheerfulness of ‘Die Taubenpost’ often sounds like a jarring non sequitur in many recordings, Bostridge's nuanced interpretations of repeated key words and their related terms (like Haus and heimlich) encourage the listener to contemplate the range of their meanings at both the cyclic and existential levels. Throughout the ersatz-cycle, his highlighting of words through techniques that defy classical singing conventions brings renewed attention to certain aspects of the poems, that, when considered all together, promote new ways of hearing relationships between the implicit and explicit themes upon which all three poets of Schwanengesang draw.
‘Einsamkeit’ presents yet another kind of song cycle, for its unity derives not so much from recurring motives as from its unbroken form. Schubert connects the six sections of Mayrhofer's poem through piano interludes; this particular formal structure looks directly back to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte as its predecessor.Footnote 13 Though published belatedly in 1840, ‘Einsamkeit’ represents an early attempt of Schubert's at the genre of the song cycle, to which he returned towards the end of his life with Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. While Schwanengesang and Winterreise present vignettes that explore and interweave major Romantic themes, ‘Einsamkeit’ offers through its uninterrupted narrative an extended rumination on what constitutes the ideal life. Composed in 1818, the same year that Schubert's Freundeskreis saw the publication of the second volume of their journal, Beyträge zur Bildung der Jünglinge (Contributions to Education for Youths), the cycle attests to resonances between Schubert's intellectual circle and his artistic output. Although Schubert did not contribute to either volume, Mayrhofer penned a piece in the second. Anton von Ottenwalt's assertion in the 1818 publication that ‘only activity [Tätigkeit] makes man fresh and happy, only activity is life; doing nothing is the true death of the soul’ brings to mind the second section of Mayrhofer's poem (‘Gib mir die Fülle der Tätigkeit’), which demands one's fill of activity.Footnote 14 Indeed, the didactic tone of Ottenwalt's pronouncement and of the classical literature in which the circle steeped themselves was part of their wider programme of ‘the cultivation of virtue by imitating the example of great men’ in the arts and letters.Footnote 15 Even the structure of Mayrhofer's ‘Einsamkeit’ betrays the influence of the classics on the composer and his friends. As Susan Youens observes, ‘Mayrhofer organises his long ode to solitude as a modern adaptation of an ancient poetic form’, in which each of the six episodes consists of a strophe and contrasting antistrophe through which the protagonist comes to reject one mode of being for another.Footnote 16
Bostridge and Vogt bring out the extremes of mood in each pair of strophes and antistrophes in Schubert's freewheeling cycle and deftly navigate the myriad changes of key and style. Bostridge's softer dynamics and sense of line are particularly moving in the first section (‘Gib mir die Fülle der Einsamkeit’), in which the subject initially embraces hermetic religious solitude, and in the last episode (‘Gib mir die Weihe der Einsamkeit’), when he – now as an old man – withdraws to nature. Vogt's nuanced shadings of modal inflections in the piano interludes linking strophes and antistrophes in the second and third episodes and in the transition into the third section remind the listener of just how intertwined major and minor and their associations with happiness and pain are in Schubert's vocal and instrumental works. As the composer detailed in his allegorical tale, ‘Mein Traum’, ‘when I wished to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I wished to sing of pain, it turned to love.’Footnote 17
These recordings of Schubert's cycles by Bostridge, Vogt and Adès present a wonderful opportunity to survey the gamut of the composer's compositions for the genre, from the early ‘Einsamkeit’ to the late Winterreise, and finally, to the posthumously arranged Schwanengesang. Bostridge's daring and compelling vocality, encouraged by Adès's compositional perspective and Vogt's thoughtful pianism, probes new depths in the composer's ‘schauerliche Lieder’.Footnote 18 Although Schubert used these words to describe Winterreise to his friends, they also aptly characterize the ‘swan songs’. Said's observation that ‘late style is in, but oddly apart from the present’Footnote 19 rings true: though all three vocal works were published after Schubert's time – too late for him to see their reception – his late works have acquired a sense of timelessness, for they endure as vessels through which we grapple with the same questions that shape and bring meaning to the human condition.
