Schubert's Winterreise with Michael Volle (Helmut Deutsch accompanying) at the Zurich opera house: review and notes

I was lucky enough last night to hear Michael Volle sing Schubert's Winterreise at the Zurich opera house. Lucky because I can afford the too expensive ticket of 60 CHF. Lucky because I lucked into a seat in the first row, and to boot was on the left-hand side, with an excellent view of Helmut Deutsch's fingers at the keyboard. I've always enjoyed concerts more when my view was better, and this vicinity to the performers was a rare luxury. Lucky finally because I live in a city where Lieder are performed fairly regularly and to a very high standard. I remember spending a week in New York and finding no performances of Lieder anywhere, and now I have steady access to it, and am grateful.

So far in Zurich at the opera house I've heard:

• Pavol Breslik sing Die schöne Müllerin (well cast, well sung, strangely tense, with a fabulous encore performance of "Der Erlkönig"). Better than his recent Lensky in Barry Kosky's Onegin.
• Waltraud Meier sing various Lieder, the finest of which was her Schönberg (the great "Lied der Waldtaube" from the Gurrelieder), the poorest of which was her botched encore singing of "Der Erlkönig". I find connecting to her sung emoting to be difficult, but the Schönberg was the absolute best fit for her voice (far better than her uneven Brahms).
• and now Michael Volle, easily the biggest voice I've ever heard sing Lieder, sung bigger than Hans Hotter. Fittingly for music this intense, there was no encore, not even of "Der Erlkönig."

What is it like to have a modern Wagnerian baritone sing little Schubert, what with Schubert's almost embarrassingly intimate and twisted pain? That was my question going in, and my focus throughout. I am sad to say that Herr Volle waited until the very last song (the mercilessly desolate "Leiermann," which he sang spectacularly well) to show his mastery of delicate singing -- delicacy produced by a change in tone, a fresh rendering of the text, a greater nuance with dynamics, a capacity to haunt without resorting to force. Delicacy: overdo it and the singing is mannered and enervated. But to sing Schubert straightforward or too boldly is to repaint Van Gogh as if he were Van Dyck. You cannot use the voice of the hunter to sing the whimpering of the hunted. 

When Herr Volle emerged on the stage and began singing, I was reminded of what must be the horrible demands of singing twenty-four songs in a row by yourself, felt an immediate sympathy with him, indeed grew almost nervous for him that he had no water, no handkerchief, no chance to escape offstage. I would like to ask a professional opera singer whether singing Lieder is harder than performing their roles; I expect they'd say yes, even though the music of Lieder is so much smaller. If a Hollywood actor stars in a play, people applaud his modesty and artistic integrity. Imagine if that actor then performed nothing but a series of monologues alone on the stage for an hour or two, and you have some idea of how exposed the Lieder singer is. That Michael Volle has sung at Bayreuth and won every accolade means very little to him once his fremder Einzug begins. And the singer's solitude befits Die Winterreise itself; this piece is to singers what Hamlet's soliloquys are to actors, a role that pits you the singer against yourself, with a too-informed audience passing obiter dicta on your every breath.

Volle, it is worth mentioning, never moved once, stepped little, swayed none, never graced his hand over the piano, forsook all of Bostridge's swooning, held the fingertips of his hands together uninterrupted for the entirety of the music. He began sweating in the first song, and was dripping by the third. Yet he persisted, huge, majestic, wrong for the part.  

Photo credit: Bayrischer Rundfunk

My saying this is so that you can feel the pathos I felt from the start of this performance. If I criticize Michael Volle it is with the highest respect for his artistry and integrity. If I criticize it is because the brute force of his titanic voice reared and roared unnecessarily, sullying the pathos inherent to the piece.

24 songs. You get a chill hearing "Gute Nacht" sung right before you if you've heard recordings of it as many times as I have. The strophic structure of the first song gives you everything that the other 23 songs will: desolation, sweet melancholy in nature, hopelessness, embrace of death. When Volle sang "Nun ist die Welt so trübe, / Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee", it was a somber verdict. When he sang two strophes later "Lass irre Hunde heulen / Vor ihres Herren Haus!" it was an anguished bark. When he sang "Sacht, sacht die Türe zu" it was heartbreakingly gentle. 

Can this song-cycle exist? I ask this though I have heard it indelibly. Can this be the same music that Elfriede Jelinek found bitterly cold enough for her violent, loveless Klavierspielerin? The music to which Thomas Mann gave the meridian of his Zauberberg, so perfectly did its "Lindenbaum" portray the German sympathy for death? Can barely 30 Schubert have taken this ironic source poetry of bad Eichendorff and rendered it an immortal portrayal of mental illness? Can he have written its Romantic piano music, rooted as it is somewhere in the cheer and song of the Viennese, and twisted it into this mourner's Kaddish of the solitary and forsaken? It was composed a year before his death. Schubert was ugly. I am reminded that this art is a miracle, which is to say that it should not exist, seems impossible, but is possible, does exist.

Volle's first several songs were all in keeping with this. His "Gefrorne Tränen" were filled with horror at the thought that the wanderer-narrator's tears could have frozen, so hotly did they pour from his anguished heart. His "Lindenbaum" was as perfect as the song is. By the time of his "Wasserflut" and "Auf dem Flusse", however, I began to hear the problem of his force. Particularly with the strophic songs, Volle started singing every remotely melancholy couplet fortissimo or more. The first times it was jarring, hateful, a way to show rage that other singers would never lend the wanderer-narrator but which he must feel in his abandonment and bitterness. Chapeau.

But force alone is just Big Sound; with couplets such as "Fühlst du meine Tränen glühen, / Da ist meiner Liebsten Haus", there is no emotional reason for mere force (THAT'S WHERE MY BELOVED LIVES!). Either express it, twist it, make it somehow delicate, or take away the empty volume. I wouldn't say that Volle's voice is wrong for Lieder, or that he failed to treat Lieder differently from operatic roles; I would say instead that he mistreated it, that he used the force of which he is divinely capable for dubious effect.

It happened over and over. What is there to bellow about "Ob's unter seiner Rinde / Wohl auch so reissend schwillt", unless the singing of these lines also testifies to the wanderer-narrator's sudden implosion of hope? 

Here is the climactic strophe in its entirety:

Mein Herz, in diesem Bache

Erkennst du nun dein Bild?

Ob's unter seiner Rinde

Wohl auch so reissend schwillt?

The scene: the frozen river is barely recognizable for the narrator as the springtime scene of joyful wandering with his now gone beloved. The iced outer layer (Rinde) of the river is over five verses gradually linked to the narrator's heart. His heart too beats warm inside a cool shell. The climax:

My heart, do you in this brook

Recognize yourself?

Might under its frozen crust

there also swell such torrents?

The final line is sung a total of five times, with the singing of the final stanza comprising half the length of the entire song. The question of dynamics seems then to answer itself: by the end at least forte, for the narrator has just conceded to his horror that his heart will freeze as the river has, and will not make it to the dew. Yet fortissimo singing alone cannot lend these lines any more pathos than Schubert has already built into them, his piano circling back and back again for another pass at the swelling schwillt. 

Here's Thomas Quastoff singing it. The final couplet is loud, forceful, but absent of Volle's misplaced anger; sung this way, it has a far more forceful resignation, recedes at the end from a forte reissend to a mezzopiano schwillt. 

My other criticism of Volle is that his ascents in any passages with an increase of pitch, tempo and dynamic are often swooningly coarse. It wouldn't appear to be a problem with breath control, for his lungs are truly Wagnerian, and as already established he has no problem finishing long phrases with twice the power of their beginning. Volle's approach to Lieder seems to bring all of his Heldenbariton to the table but not enough of the watertight musicianship, expressed best in both the doleful and the sinewy lyricism that the genre can require. 

Yet of lyricism he is more than capable. His "Krähe" was exquisite (the spiteful 'Krähe, lass mich endlich seh'n / Treue bis zum Grabe' really does sound better from a voice this huge). His arching, yawping moan of a 'Wein' auf meiner Hoffnung Grab' in "Letzte Hoffnung" was unforgettable. He sang "Der Wegweiser" as a perfect counterpiece to the final "Leiermann," with a huge 'Ohne Ruh, und suche Ruh' before a possessed 'Einen Weiser seh' ich stehen.' Then he mucked it up again with a fortissimo 'Sind wir selber Götter' in "Mut"; only a madman would scream at the gods, and Volle's scream was, sadly, as sound as they come.

The accompanist Helmut Deutsch played the music miraculously faithfully, with gorgeous musicianship and dynamics that somehow found a way to serve Volle when he got carried away but to not get lost underneath him. When Deutsch's sheet music fell to the floor in the middle of "Erstarrung," he was anything but erstarrt; he simply kept playing, kept the left hand running if he needed to rescue a page with his right, showed no impatience, stopped playing for all of two seconds when the entire score was bedlam, recovered just in time for the final strophe. Right after the performance was done, from my front row seat, I could see Deutsch backstage, between sincere and touching ovations, apologizing to his singer for the lapse. I watched Volle wave his pianist's apologies away with his benign, enormous hand.

The two musicians were expertly together throughout, and I got the impression that Deutsch is such a masterful accompanist, that he has played Die Winterreise so many times, that he and Volle did not see the need to rehearse together obsessively in advance of this performance. That would explain why Deutsch's faithful playing was only that, faithful. It would also explain why the two men were not in my estimation seeking to create much of anything new. This is probably good enough for Zurich and its opera going public, and for musicians as talented and accomplished as these, but there is more that can be achieved with Schubert's Winterreise, and there is no reason not to strive against what the likes of Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and more recently Thomas Quastoff have achieved with this music. So I will put this sweet evening in my pocket, thank Herrn Volle and Deutsch gratefully for their terrific labor, and keep my eyes and ears open for a performance that is finer still.