Talent, said Laurence Olivier, was plentiful; skill much rarer. Genius in a performing artist is rarer still, but Olivier had it, and so does Christian Gerhaher, the Bavarian baritone, who presented Schubert’s three song-cycles last week in a series of concerts that brought splendour to Wigmore Hall. This was singing of exceptional quality and, just as important, exceptional intelligence. Expectations were high, yet Gerhaher met them in full. By the time he concluded Schwanengesang, with its terrifying vision of Der Doppelgänger, he had taken the audience on an emotional journey they will hold dear when winter nights draw in, and for many winters to come.
Daniel Harding, the English conductor, calls Gerhaher ‘the greatest musician I have ever worked with’. Musician is the word. There are many wonderful singers who have done justice to Schubert’s unique world of melancholy — the melancholy that can bring profound joy. But the singers who can project these songs — the greatest ever composed — with such honesty, directness and lack of sentimentality are rather fewer. There was nothing self-conscious or mannered about these performances, as there can be when singers search for meaning by adding unearned weight. There was no ‘beautiful’ singing for the sake of beauty. Instead, with the accompaniment of Gerold Huber at the piano, there was complete fidelity to the spirit and sense of what the immortal Franz wrote.
Gerhaher’s is not a big voice, though there is enough ginger in it for those moments of despair, when Schubert finds a bleakness that is surely unparalleled in all music. It is, however, entirely natural. It has warmth and amplitude, and his diction must be the envy of all performers, on the lyric stage or the dramatic. A fair few actors on the London stage, where standards have fallen sharply, could learn an awful lot from Gerhaher’s projection. Singers in general make more of words than actors; certainly, many modern actors.
Des Baches Wiegenlied, that ‘half in love with easeful death’ lullaby which closes Die schöne Müllerin, is a case in point. Huber proved a memorable comrade here, tweaking the gently rocking melody each time it came back. Then, the song sung, and the unfortunate miller of the tale asleep for ever, there was no unnecessary silence, in which the audience could wallow. Nor was there any grim, bite-the-bottom-lip indulgence after Winterreise. Gerhaher’s intention is to involve his listeners, not manipulate them. At Wigmore Hall, where the fairest-minded audiences are to be found, he succeeded triumphantly.
Greatness sometimes announces itself by demanding: ‘listen to me’. It overwhelms, and has been known to go off if it lacks proportion. The highest tribute one can pay Gerhaher is that, over three memorable evenings, the real hero was Schubert. This will surprise nobody who heard his Wolfram in the Royal Opera’s Tannhäuser last year, or his Christ in the St Matthew Passion that Sir Simon Rattle conducted in Birmingham.
‘Master class’ sounds wrong. That phrase brings with it a whiff of the classroom. This was living, breathing artistry: the fruit of one man’s intelligence. If great singing is about the alignment of feeling and intellect, then Christian Gerhaher is a great singer. Many people at Wigmore Hall would have gone further than that. They would say they had heard the finest singer in the world.
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