Schubert completed his great song-cycle Winterreise in what was effectively his own last winter; he would be dead just a year later. In this setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, depicting a man rejected in love and his painful journey across a freezing, stormy landscape, both actual and metaphorical, the singer’s challenge is exploring that balance between vocal and psychological elements.
By his own admission, tenor Ian Bostridge’s engagement with the cycle has long been obsessive. Now, he and pianist Julius Drake – singer as ego and pianist as id, Bostridge’s definition of the relationship – have collaborated with Deborah Warner in creating a staged version and it seems as if all their previous experience – 100-plus performances, different recordings, a film as well as a book – has flowed logically into this powerful and deeply moving piece of theatre.
In the Ustinov’s black box, the fine acoustic combines with the intimacy of the space to make the audience both witnesses and fellow travellers, with Justin Nardella’s chalked-on-walls design and Jean Kalman’s lighting adding just enough detail – stylised suggestions of a grave, stony path, frozen river – to support the narrative without over embellishment.
Against this stark background, Bostridge and Drake carefully ratchet up the cycle’s intrinsic drama, unconstrained by the parameters of a recital realising a far wider range of dynamics and instrumental colour than usual. The piano felt like a whole orchestra, descriptive and evocative; Drake’s magisterial command of tonal inflections allowing him to invest Schubert’s transitions from minor to major mode and major to minor with acute emotional point, with Bostridge bringing to the illusory, dreamlike, incursions into the major an almost ecstatic air of delusion.
He is a singer who always conveys a restless intensity: here there was torment, anger, fiery passion, icy resignation, a mirror to Schubert’s existential anguish, but also in this wanderer the representation of every individual who has suffered loss and the darkest despair. Pushed to extremes, lines could carry a manic force or a whispered precision.
While death mostly seems to be the only possible outcome of the cycle’s trajectory, the ending nevertheless carries a degree of ambiguity. Warner underlined this by introducing an element of hope in Die Nebensonnen as the wanderer opens the studio shutters to let in evening light, with an old man who from the outset has observed everything on the periphery then returning as the hurdy-gurdy man, Der Leiermann, perhaps turning the whole story full circle. As the wanderer asks whether his tune will accompany his songs, he rests his hand on the old man’s head and the questions hang in the air: can there be solace or is the wanderer condemned to a lifetime of singing out his pain?
• Further performances on 13 June and 8-10 September at the Ustinov Studio, Bath.
