Interview, Benjamin Appl on Winterreise

With its fixation on isolation and seemingly endless icy walks, it's perhaps no surprise that Schubert's great song-cycle is a work which has resonated with performers and listeners alike over the last couple of particularly bleak winters, with over a dozen new recordings of the piece appearing since the first lockdowns began in early 2020. Last Friday saw the German baritone Benjamin Appl join their number for his first project on Alpha Classics, recorded around the same time as the upcoming film Winter Journey (shot on location in the Swiss Alps and due to be broadcast on BBC4 next Sunday).

Ahead of his Wigmore Hall performance of Winterreise this coming Friday, I spoke to Benjamin about his early encounters with the cycle, why he finds it such an 'endlessly rewarding' work, how his mentor Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau influenced his approach to German song, and the forthcoming fruits of his new relationship with Alpha...

How did your own ‘Winter Journey’ begin?

I heard one of the songs for the first time when I was in school – a teacher played us one of the Fischer-Dieskau recordings, and that was actually the reason that I started loving songs. It really was love at first sight: I didn’t know anything about the cycle, I just fell in love with this piece of music and how it was communicated so directly on this recording. My very first encounter, though, was thanks to my grandfather, who’s not musical at all: his singing was always out of tune, but he sang every day and one of his favourites was ‘Der Lindenbaum’, so I got to know that more as a folk-song than as high art.

When I started business admin studies and studied singing in parallel, I learned a lot of song-repertoire but never explored Winterreise – I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but at that stage I just didn’t really connect with it. Eventually I was asked to sing it in recital, during a very busy period; I remember my father picking me up on the Sunday evening to drive me to the town where I’d be singing it on the coming Friday…in the course of the four-hour car-journey I learned two songs, and then realised I still had twenty-two more to go!

On the one hand that’s absolutely not the right way to prepare, but on the other it was so intense and dense that it was a unique experience – for those four or five days I worked from 7AM until 11 at night, studying the score and writing out the text. Right up to the dress-rehearsal I was still fine-tuning about No. 8 – even today, that particular song is a thorn in my side!

Are there any other notable ‘thorns’ on the journey for you?!

There are stretches of the cycle where one song flows into the next, for instance from Nos. 1 to 5. And then suddenly things become uncomfortable: the songs become shorter (a few are under a minute) and the shifts in mood are more rapid as everything gets more unhinged. But I think that’s an inherent part of the structure - sometimes you’re moving forward quite naturally, and sometimes you get stuck!

I also find the placement of ‘Im Dorfe’ very strange, and it throws up lots of questions: has he come back to the village which he left, or is it somewhere else altogether? We don’t know, and that’s what I find so interesting in this cycle: when you ask questions you don’t get an answer, you just get more questions! It’s really like a journey where you’re standing at a crossroads and have to make a decision about which direction to take, but every time you’re offered more branches. I don’t know whether that was consciously done by Schubert or not, but it’s exactly how you feel when you perform it.

I find this particular cycle endlessly rewarding, because every performance is so dependent on your own frame of mind that day – maybe you got a bad phone-call, maybe you had a difficult conversation (or a wonderful conversation), and it all feeds into your Winterreise. There are so many layers and so many different routes – it IS a journey, an emotional inner journey for the audience and performers. Each performance can completely switch mood and direction in the space of a short piano interlude.

Do you have a set back-story for the Winterreise protagonist in terms of who he is, where he comes from and why the relationship ended?

I try to make it feel different each time, and I think it’s very important. When people ask me about what I learned from Fischer-Dieskau, that’s what I always come back to: of course I could say a hundred things about technique and his reputation, but what I found most inspiring was how he created everything afresh. Whenever he was teaching he’d prepare for days, learning the music off-copy again so that he knew every detail without needing to use the score. He’d ask so many questions about harmonies, about the poet’s background and situation, and I think that’s the sign of a great artist: to dig deep, and not to deliver a performance but to create it from scratch every time.

And Winterreise is a wonderful work for that. There are a few lines in the early songs about the situation with the girl, but as the cycle goes on it becomes less clear – we don’t know how they broke up, if he treated her badly, or if she had someone else…In the end we really don’t know much about her at all, and that openness is the extraordinary thing about this music. My instinct is that she broke up with him, but it was the last straw: he’s someone who wants to go into his inner world and ask questions which society doesn’t ask; he wants to step away from society and be the outsider, because he’s brave. That’s why he’s so accusatory about the sleeping villagers in ‘Im Dorfe’: they don’t ask questions, they just sleep through life. So I think going on the journey is his own choice – maybe he was pushed by the situation with this girl, but that’s not the main reason.

Did you enjoy Joyce DiDonato’s recent interpretation of the cycle from the woman’s point of view?

Yes! I think it’s so vital to try things out like this, putting things into different spaces, perspectives and arrangements. It isn’t a replacement for the traditional way of performing and presenting it, but it makes us ask questions, and that’s the most important thing as artists and audiences. I’ve done something similar, where I perform the cycle with an actor who reads texts from an Austro-Hungarian notebook from the period: the language is so close to the language of Winterreise: there are barking dogs, there are Urlichten, and this whole relationship with the icy landscape, so it’s quite an interesting project.

Some people don’t like the idea of disrupting the cycle by having spoken text in-between the songs, but others do, because those ‘disruptions’ put you into a different place. When you get to a song lasting just fifty seconds in that framework you really have to make it work, to be worth those fifty seconds standing on its own.

You mentioned your relationship with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau – how did that come about?

The attraction towards his singing of lieder was always so strong, and the zone where I felt most comfortable was always German song; most of the teachers in Munich (and later in London) told me you can never have a career based primarily around recitals, but I thought there was always a chance…Then in around 2005 I read about a Schubertiade masterclass with Fischer-Dieskau in Schwarzenberg, so I applied. You had to compile a list of ten Schubert songs you’d like to work on with Fischer-Dieskau, and I’d heard from others that he could be very tricky in masterclasses so I applied with thirty songs; a few weeks later a list came back with four Schubert songs and none of them were part of my list!

On my first day at Schwarzenberg there was another young baritone sitting next to me; the assistant came over to us before the start of the session to say that Fischer-Dieskau would like to talk to him in the green-room, and we never saw him again…later on I found out that there was always one person he removed!

So when I was called into the green-room on the last day I panicked - but he gave me all his private contact-details and offered to work with me! And from that point on, he really became a mentor until the end of his life in 2012 – I’d stay at his house for three or four nights and we’d work for six hours a day, going through all my songs and opera and oratorio repertoire. He’d talk to me not just about technique, but also about stage-presence and putting programmes together. Sometimes he called me fifteen times a day, almost like a parent with a child, and I got a lot of scores from him. The last time I saw him was four weeks before he died – he was very weak and depressed, and somehow I just knew that I wouldn’t see him again.

Which other singers do you gravitate towards in the cycle?

There are so many fantastic recordings that it’s hard to choose…I like the early Thomas Hampson, I adore Brigitte Fassbaender’s very strong, almost brutal approach to the cycle. As with most things in life, it all depends on how you’re feeling at the time: someone could present you with the most fantastic steak, but if you’re in the mood for something green it isn’t going to hit the spot! Even with Fischer-Dieskau, sometimes you’re completely blown away and sometimes there’s an inner resistance.

Have there been any extra-musical sources of inspiration for you in terms of how you think about Winterreise?

I remember going to Madrid and visiting the Prado, where there’s an entire room full of these incredible black paintings by Goya, and I thought what an amazing experience it would be to perform this cycle amongst them – somehow it resonates. Nature of course resonates, as do certain situations in life: I’ve performed Die schöne Müllerin for people who’d never been to a Western classical music concert, which was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

I was also so keen to make this project with the BBC happen during this past difficult period, because some of the texts resonated very much with the isolation and being alone and asking questions about life, relationships with other people and so on. I talked to a friend of mine who’s a Schubert expert and also a professor of psychoanalysis; I asked him about the psychology behind walking (which many of us did a lot more during the lockdowns), and he related that to both Schubert and Freud. There are so many points you can connect.

How are you enjoying working with Alpha Classics, and what’s next on the agenda in terms of recording plans?

It's so wonderful to be working with a label where everyone’s really interested in the music. And Didier Martin at Alpha knows the repertoire inside-out: he has opinions on it, he comes to concerts, and he’s always available for his artists. I also love Alpha’s beautiful artwork, and being able to plan ahead for the next five or six years is something I’ve never experienced anywhere else.

There will be seven albums, and the next one will be a concept-album called Forbidden Fruit, featuring music ranging from early Renaissance songs to Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter and Jake Heggie - all sorts! And there will be one very famous song which has never previously been performed by a man… The idea is to explore all kinds of seduction in humanity - not only the sensual and erotic, but many other layers and taboos. It’s in order of the Genesis story, so there will be lines from Genesis sometimes spoken over the music and sometimes between the songs…Purists might not like it, but the whole point is that ‘forbidden fruit’ is something which you’re normally not allowed!

Then there will be an album of György Kurtág, who’s someone I’ve worked with for many years now, featuring some of his music and songs by Schubert and Brahms which he and I chose together. The nice thing is that I can plan ahead!