A Singer’s Life – Performance comparisons after ‘Winterreise’

After two performances of Franz Schubert’s masterpiece on consecutive weekends, in Helensburgh and Edinburgh, I have been thinking about how different each recital turned out to be and trying to analyse the reasons. The fact that I now sing very few public concerts, and no operas, is crucial to my understanding of this situation, when two performances of an identical work, with the same two musicians, but in different venues, can be so dissimilar. In the past, when I was in full non-stop career mode, there was literally no time to reflect on nuances and subtleties in interpretation, as I was immediately involved in either learning a new role or piece or travelling to a new venue. The discipline involved in pursuing a professional operatic career was such that these moments of reflection were rare, as the rigours of a performing schedule inevitably moved on from day to day. I don’t mean that I was rushing from city to city every day, although for those at the very top of the profession, that is sadly the norm. I was reminded of the old poem, ‘Leisure’, written by the obscure Welsh poet, William Henry Davies, in 1911, the first lines of which were known by all schoolchildren of my generation:

What is this life, if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?

Apart from the fact that it was often misquoted, replacing stand with stop, and that the rest of it is pretty banal, this little poem manages to evoke a whole lifestyle within a few lines, a lifestyle to avoid, but also one to seek to attain.

Since my unfortunate accident in 2018, I do have much more time now to stand (or in my preferred case, sit) and stare, and that has allowed me to contemplate the rather exciting variations that occurred from one performance to another, of ‘Winterreise’, this famous winter journey undertaken by a sad young man in the aftermath of the ending of a passionate affair.  I hope that my musings here might be of some interest to both performers and listeners alike.

My thoughts have been concentrated by the arrival on my computer of the first full version of the recording we made last Saturday at the second performance. I had asked my friend, the excellent recording producer, Peter Haigh, of Pier House Studios, to record the concert given by Derek Clark and myself, mainly just for interest and my archives. I was not expecting my performance to be worth listening to over and over, as I now cannot breathe long phrases, or hold high notes, because my accident has resulted in my spine becoming somewhat bent, and my diaphragm muscle, the grand motor of the singing voice, sadly reduced in strength. To my delight, and amazement, the recording backed up what many of my friends and colleagues said after the two concerts, that this disability, or at least potential problem, had been superseded by an enhanced emotional and interpretive factor, which had allowed me to sing unencumbered by any technical baggage in a desire to get the story told! Consequently, I am now able to compare not only the two recent performances, as outlined above, but also my older interpretation of which I possess a recording, made at the Guildhall School with Jeremy Sams as accompanist in 1980! Now, I am not so arrogant as to attempt to compare myself with the many recordings made over his lifetime by the wonderful Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but the interest sparked by his series of different interpretations, with different pianists, permits me, on a less elevated level, to compare how I have sung this masterpiece of musical genius over the years as well as from week to week in 2024.

‘Winterreise’ was composed in 1827 in the last few months of Schubert’s life, and he died, in 1828,  while editing the score, which he never heard sung in concert. I have written elsewhere for the EMR about the composition and my love for the cycle, so I won’t waste time and space here going over what has already been written. What is necessary to know is that I sing the cycle in the low voice version, published by Peters Edition, in the same keys as the great Hans Hotter, lower than Fischer-Dieskau and considerably lower than the tenor keys sung by Peter Pears. Nearly 200 years have passed since the cycle was written, and it is now acknowledged that there is no standard key which is better than any other, and so anyone can sing it, provided they have a voice and a brain (oh, and a good grasp of German).

The most important difference I have found between these two recitals and the recording by my younger self, is the risk-taking element which is much more evident now. I look at the differences between the two recent performances soon, but what has really surprised me, in comparing 1980 with 2024, both live recordings, is the much more adventurous way I have interpreted the 24 songs now.

The first recording, at the age of 25, is surprisingly mature in conception, but broad in interpretation, by which I mean that there seems to be a thread running through the journey, both physically and mentally, clearly showing the listener how the poet has gone from the initial rejection by the girl and her family, through several stages of introspection and self-awareness, to despair and madness at the end, all couched in the language of poetry and dominated by the wintry weather on the journey. The singing is fine, with long phrases, a big range from very deep to quite high, a youthful freshness to the voice, and nuanced inflection to the German words. The phrasing is very elegant and smooth, with careful attention to dynamics and rhythms, and I can see how the audience must have been moved at the end, as we sang about the sad old hurdy-gurdy player, droning away to an audience of stray dogs and empty spaces. The fact that I sang it all from memory, with very few misplaced words, is testament to a young singer at the beginning of a long career.

It’s fascinating, now, to listen to the interpretation of the work by a 68 year old, after a lifetime of performances, with a voice which is instantly recognisable as the same instrument, but with an ability to see the music and the words anew, from a different angle. I can’t say that the sound has changed much. I have been careful over the years to keep my voice flexible and fresh sounding. Many older singers develop a wobble or a beat to the voice, or a darkening or thickening of the sound. That really hasn’t happened in my case. There was quite a fast vibrato in my early years, pleasing to some but intrusive to others. About halfway through my career, with the help of my vocal guru, the wonderful Tony Roden, we largely eliminated that fast vibrato, which had been caused principally by a faulty tongue position, and so I was able to sing much bigger roles and some which were much higher in tessitura. I never pushed the voice in a direction it didn’t want to go, so it still sounds moderately youthful. It has always been a very bright, forward sound, sometimes described as a baritone in a bass range. The main change has come in the last six years: the fractured vertebra, the consequent hospitalisation and the onset of Ankylosing Spondylitis which has bent the spine, making me 6 inches shorter than I was in 2018. All this has weakened my diaphragm support and prohibited me from taking long breaths. It means that even simple phrases need two breaths when one sufficed before, and long phrases must be negotiated and planned. However, necessity breeds invention, and so my weakened support has allowed me to find all sorts of phrasing and breathing solutions which I didn’t realise were possible. This in turn has led to me finding all sorts of vocal colours and subtleties, which have permitted me to be much more inventive in my interpretation.

Looking now at the two performances of ‘Winterreise’ on 28th January in the Parish Church, Helensburgh and on 3rd February in St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh, I was surprised by the differences in just a week. Both venues are churches with lovely clear acoustics, resonant but with no serious echo. Both seat about 300 people, so they are not vast and impersonal, and the performer has a true interaction with the audience. The Helensburgh church, built in 1853, and known for many years as the West Kirk, has a more normal church layout, with a rectangular nave, while STAG, recently renamed as the New Town Church, was built in 1784 on an elliptical plan, the first in Britain. Originally St Andrew’s Church, it was one of the iconic buildings of Edinburgh’s New Town, demonstrating in architecture the concepts of the Scottish Enlightenment.

I must say that it was a joy for Derek and myself to perform in both beautiful churches, and their warm acoustics played their part in the success of the two concerts. At no point did I ever doubt that I could be heard, even at the back, but, on the other hand, I felt at liberty to let rip on occasions, without fear of overwhelming the audience. This freedom allowed me to try to find special effects for particular words and phrases, and this was the catalyst for the quite different interpretation I found for the cycle from my first essay over 40 years ago.

The differences between the two recent concerts were less marked, but nonetheless profound. I suppose the most noticeable change was that for the second concert, the fear of innovation was absent, as I had tried all sorts of things in Helensburgh for the first time, and could judge the success or failure then to find the best balance in the second. In Helensburgh, coming back to the cycle after at least a 10 year gap, and with diminished physical resources, I was of necessity more tentative in what I was prepared to try in public, whereas in Edinburgh, and also with an audience containing many of my friends, I felt relaxed enough to take some enormous risks, nearly all of which came off!

The huge difference between 1980 and 2024 is that I don’t sing from memory now. It may mean that one has less direct contact with the audience, and one can’t, as it were, assume the role of protagonist, as the musical score gets in the way, but on the other hand, it is enormously freeing to the performer. One no longer has to worry about the next line, or of drying up in mid-sentence, and you can concentrate on putting the words and music over directly to the audience. This is another reason why I dislike the modern fashion for semi-staging of concert versions of operas. Since, by their very nature, concert performances will have only limited rehearsal time, a lot of the stress involved in performing is in simply remembering the words. As we get older, this procedure becomes more difficult and more stressful, and I often found myself spending more time and effort in this process than in interpreting the music and the words. For years in the middle part of my career, I sang many concert performances of little known operas with an excellent group called Chelsea Opera, who put on concerts in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s South Bank, with professional soloists fronting a semi-pro orchestra. We learned the roles but used the scores, and I defy anyone to tell me that we didn’t deliver great dramatic performances of these pieces, without sets, costumes, or a director. It was just intelligent singers working well together, without the strain of having to remember every word and note. Similarly, in these concerts, I was able to concentrate on putting over the words and music that Schubert and Müller had written, without fear of forgetting.

Forgive me for mixing my comparisons between the two recent concerts and the old recording, but I have found it most interesting and quite informative to have made the comparisons, and I hope I have enlightened you a little about the process of learning and performing too. Unless you are a superfan or an obsessive concert goer, members of my audiences rarely get to hear more than one performance of anything that I sing, but I have been attempting here to give an insight into how recitals, in particular, can vary enormously from one to the other. We, as artists, normally don’t have time to analyse these variations, and I suppose I am lucky now, in the later stages of my career, that I do have the time, and also the platform, to air these thoughts.