Winterreise

In modern times around here (the UK) a winter’s journey usually means taking a “no-frills” budget airline flight to stay on a volcano just off the African coast. Last week my wife and I did this for the first time in our lives, inadvertently completely avoiding the heaviest snow to fall in our area for 18 years. As you can see, we did encounter some snow on Tenerife but only above about 7,000 feet. The locals have an interesting habit of building a miniature snowman and putting it on the passenger side of the bonnet of their cars.

Mount Teide is quite spectacular but at over 12,000 feet it is a bit beyond us these days and I’m too impatient to wait 3 hours for the cable car. So we climbed up to about 9,000 feet on a smaller peak along it on one of the better days before the snow fell. There are other spectacular bits of the island – Anaga in the North-East and Los Gigantes in the North West. We also went amazing walks in both these areas too. Apart from petrol, cheap it was not since for Euro one can virtually read Pound but, overall, it was well worth it.

The real Winterreise – Müller’s poems set by Schubert is one of the most haunting pieces of music I know and comes into this story more than once. On the day before we left I received an mp3 player for my birthday (another first) – a neat little gadget (Sony NWZ-8135) holding 2 gigabytes that is basically a memory stick that charges up when you put it in the USB slot of the computer and lasts for 16 hours. I tried to put Christine Schäfer’s Onyx recording of the piece (which I reviewed in 2006) onto the gadget but ripped it in the wrong format and didn’t have time to sort it out.

Whilst we were taking a final walk on the beach, unbeknown to me at the time, Radio 3’s Building a Library work was Winterreise. Once I found that out on our return, this became a high priority for listening via the iPlayer. It turned out that the reviewer Daniel Leech-Wilkinson had listened to 70 versions in a month – much as I love the piece I don’t think I’d manage that! And, to my amazement, he picked Schäfer as his top choice. This amazement doesn’t stem from any disagreement with the pick – it is my favourite version out of the five I own (Fischer-Dieskau, Hotter, Pears, Goerne are the other singers) but that he should go for a female voice as the single “library” choice. In fact, it seemed that his last two contenders left standing were females (contralto Natalie Stutzmann was the other). To be fair he picked a male choice (Goerne) and a historic choice (Lehmann) but it was surprising that he didn’t mention Pears at all or tell us which of the ten DFD recordings (I have the 1971 version with Moore) he liked best. Nor were we told which recordings (“by opera singers”) needed to be avoided.

Although I enjoyed listening to the programme I also found it fairly frustrating in its brevity and feel that the format needs a rethink. It was fine when there were half-a-dozen versions of major works available at any one time (say 20 years ago) but now it has become unrealistic. Most importantly, it is commonly hard to understand from one or two snatches why the reviewer has chosen a particular version. Also, I am not clear who the programme is really for – the newcomer to the work or someone who already has a few versions? Above all, how could one live with only one version of Winterreise anyway?

I shall be taking a few more Winterreise’s – of the Schubert variety – before this one is out and will be ****** glad when it’s over too!