Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself. But Kaufmann rightly insisted that Hotter’s various recordings are dramatic, with Hotter enacting, not narrating the monodrama. So it’s not always easy to tell.
There was no doubt, though, in Christian Gerhaher’s recent performance of the cycle at the Wigmore Hall, with his long-time accompanist Gerold Huber, that we were witnessing the journey and sufferings presented directly. The atmosphere in the hall was extraordinary — a mid-January evening and not a cough to be heard. There was even a gap of silence after the final song, before tentative applause began and swelled.
Oddly, Gerhaher used a music stand and seemed to consult the score between songs, in a work that he and Huber must have performed dozens of times, though surely never with greater intensity than here. Gerhaher employed all the vocal resources that he has, though some of them weren’t fully reliable. The remarkable thing was that every note he sang sounded meaningful. He abstained from any hamming, even when virtually yelling the climax of some songs and whispering others. I was at the back of the hall and occasionally he was inaudible. In the sixth song, ‘Wasserflut’ (‘Flood’), Huber desynchronised the hands for the recurring dotted quavers and triplets, giving the effect of limping. In professional Schubert circles, that is regarded as a mistake, but if it is one it’s a mistake of genius.
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