It starts with a farewell full of regrets. As the songs unfold, we get a bit of a story—the singer’s love is marrying another. He explodes in bitterness and anger. He feels the cold.
Then with the fifth song, The Linden Tree, the mood changes: Wilhelm Müller’s words continue the pastoral themes, but Schubert’s music becomes more introspective. The subsequent nineteen songs go deeper and deeper.
We never get the details, we only get his experience. From a cozy Biedermeier salon the audience is propelled into the world of expressionist monologue—out into the forest with the keening woman in Schoenberg’s Expectation, or into the dusty junkshop of Beckett’s regretful Krapp.
There are variations of tone, nuances of feeling, that take us inside the abandoned lover. For a moment he forgets his sorrow (Dream of Spring), but he’s overwhelmed by a sense that his life is over (The Inn).
Matthias Goerne’s voice is an amazing dramatic instrument: infallibly fine in quiet passages, but powerful when necessary.
Then at the end (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), he encounters a wretched street musician. Our fictional narrator, given voice by the singer, comments on the music-making that has been happening for the last hour. It is pathetic and futile, of course, but “Strange old man / Shall I go with you? / Will you play your organ / To my songs?”
It’s dramatically inevitable that the singer should address those last words to the accompanist at the piano, but Matthias Goerne spent the whole recital turned to Christoph Eschenbach. Bernard Shaw wrote somewhere that the best theatrical prop recital singers have is their eyes. Goerne directing his outbursts toward the pianist was a dramatic conceit that hindered connecting with the audience.
[Image: Samuel Palmer, Study, 1830s?]
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