Schubert, Substack, and Serendipity
Schubert Listening Challenge, week five
There is such a thing as "Substack Serendipity." I have experienced it numerous times. It comes in many forms: I'll be thinking of a text or an idea, and something will pop up in my feed from a favorite writer that strikes a chord with it. It also can happen that delaying a piece will work to my advantage, not only because I have more time for the ideas and prose to percolate, but also because I may stumble across something in the meantime that makes all the difference.
I took the holiday weekend off, which pushed this piece back a couple of days. To be honest, I was also struggling with this particular post, not because of the writing, but because I couldn't decide which recording to choose to recommend for that greatest of all song cycles, Schubert's Winterreise. I've been listening to it for decades, and I have a few favorite recordings. But there are some issues. For one thing, the cycle was written for tenor, but it has come to be associated with baritones—and one baritone in particular: Dietrich Fischer-Diskau (the legendary “DFD,” the “King of Lieder”), who recorded it about a dozen times between the 1950s and 1980s. But here is the thing: I generally prefer a tenor in this music, because the relatively bright timbre in the voice acts as a potential balancing agent to the nearly relentless darkness of the piece. But which tenor? Ian Bostridge? Mark Padmore? Peter Pears? They are all great, but sort of acquired tastes.
But there is another problem: there are literally hundreds of recordings of the cycle, and I have heard only about a dozen or so over the years, and know only a handful of them well. Every time I looked at the list of recordings, I saw several more that I felt like I needed to listen to before deciding on a recommendation to add to our Schubert playlist.
Enter David Hurwitz. Long-time subscribers may remember that I recommended his classical music YouTube channel a few months ago in this post. He has forty years of experience as a music critic and knows as much about the recorded history of the repertoire as anyone on the planet.
Well, just as I was about to take the plunge and make my more or less arbitrary choice, I checked Dave's YouTube channel to find that just a few hours earlier he had dropped a new video on Winterreise, covering twenty recordings and making superb recommendations. Substack serendipity. So, he basically had done my job for me. I did my due diligence and listened to his top recommendation, and he was right, it's a stunner, and one that I had never heard before. Furthermore, it's sung by a baritone, but so superbly that I found myself not caring. As far as I know, I had never listened to any recordings by Roman Trekel before, but I will certainly be seeking him out in the future.
Here is Dave's video, for your deep dive. He calls it "the greatest and most harrowing song cycle in the repertoire," and he's right—as usual:
Links to the PCF Schubert Playlist:
The PCF Schubert Playlist on Apple Music
The PCF Schubert Playlist on Spotify
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.
I've never sung this cycle (but have heard women sing it at festivals and admire the recording by Brigitte Fassbänder) but listen to it often. The recording I return to the most now is the live 1985 (Dresden) performance of Peter Schreier and Sviatoslav Richter. I think Schreier achieves the perfect melding of vigor and vulnerability, you can feel his breath as he sings. Some people criticize the tempi as too slow, but I think Richter provides Schreier's lyricism with a profound platform from which to take flight.
I recently finished reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and a song from Winterreise, Der Lindenbaum, is a key image/motif near the end. A few days later I came across an interesting crossover album by by Rosemary Standley with some variations on songs from Winterreise. Several signs that it's time to listen to the original!