Joyce DiDonato doesn’t just sing Winterreise. She acts it too. This is not as rare as you may imagine. The desolated lover’s winter journey is an accommodating masterwork. Actor-singers including Håkan Hagegård, Mark Padmore and Simon Keenlyside have performed staged versions too, establishing for all except diehard purists that a traditional male voice and piano recital need not necessarily be the only way with Schubert’s bleak setting of Wilhelm Müller poems.
DiDonato takes this a step further by inhabiting the songs from the standpoint of the woman whom the poet has deserted. Many women, including Alice Coote, have performed these songs with searing authenticity, but DiDonato’s theatrical skills bring something more. Costumed in black mourning, she sings each song from the poet’s journal, giving her voice to the verses within. Only at the end, in Schubert’s totemic final song, Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder), does she put the journal aside and own the song outright, and with it the whole cycle’s pain, as her own.
It is ingenious artistry, characteristic of DiDonato, and it enabled her to confront not just one, but two, of Winterreise’s challenges. One is that the poet’s journey is already so vivid as to demand some characterisation from any singer. The other is that it allows DiDonato to feminise the cycle in a particularly original way. To borrow Wagner’s term, her approach felt like a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art.
There was innovation too in the fortepiano accompaniment by Maxim Emelyanychev (who conducted DiDonato in Handel’s Agrippina at the Royal Opera in 2019). The instrument’s drier sound brought special brittleness to the haunting Der Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree) and an appropriate spikiness to Letzte Hoffnung (Last Hope). But not even Emelyanychev could produce the terrible finality that a modern piano brings to the postlude to Das Wirtshaus (The Inn).
Did this add up to too many distractions? Occasionally that thought flickered. Yet Winterreise is big enough to take new approaches. It helps that DiDonato’s voice can still conjure so many colours and shades as she achieves in songs like Irrlicht (Will o’ the Wisp) and Rast (Rest) or such emotional vulnerability as in Der Greise Kopf (The Hoary Head). Her shock at the poet’s self-dramatisation in a song like Der Wegweiser (The Signpost) felt truly raw.
Yet the emotional climax of the evening was yet to come. An encore after Winterreise is extremely rare, but DiDonato told the audience she wanted to give them a bit of hope amid these abnormal times of grief and chaos. We all knew exactly what awfulness she was referring to. When she sang Richard Strauss’s Morgen! (Tomorrow!), with its message that tomorrow the sun will shine again, it was a message that cut to the heart – and the memory of it still does.
