New meeting with the baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer who has just published a very beautiful book-disc of the winter travel Schubertian, singing in Nantes the 24 melodies of this cycle with a confusing presence.
A “winter journey”, a musical journey
Every time it’s a trip, and especially when I sing winter journey, obviously. An hour and a quarter without stopping, it’s entering a form of trance. It’s not just a lied or an excerpt.
To determine this with a single adjective would be far too little. And at the same time “Schubert, the quintessence of romanticism” is very banal. But that’s it…
Another Schubertian paradox…
He obliges the singer to a classical rigor while sometimes showing an unbridled expressionism. So you have to stick to the rigor of the language, the phrase, the melodic design while being careful not to let yourself be overwhelmed by emotions, nature, feelings. It is therefore a corseted rigor but at the same time wildly expressionist. The paradox, one of Schubert’s paradoxes…
An anti-suicide work
In winter journey, it is the man in the middle of a hostile nature but who prefers to get lost in it than to resign himself to his own death. It is the anti-suicide, in fact, this work. Even if it is called winter journey, even if there is this idea of an end of life, this traveler is a young man full of passion, of vitality, certainly betrayed, disappointed by love, but who prefers to face the unleashed, frozen elements, and who nevertheless overwhelm him, rather than falling asleep, becoming numb. Stay straight. This man stays upright. In any case the expression is carried so high, so strong, that one should not seek at all costs the intimacy of the song either.
Edwin Crossley-Mercer C) Karl Lagerfeld
The need for multiple voices?
Even if, of course, you have to forget your instinct to opera singer for whom the voice is my medium. It would almost be necessary to be able to have several voices to fully express this nature, a living character, as alive as man.
There is obviously, when you look at the other lieder, an incredible variety, which requires each time to retune your feelings, and also the singing. There are even somewhat Italianate lieder, with a purely vocal appeal, where one could say to oneself, beyond the text, ha! it’s more beautiful than anything because it’s well sung.
Beethoven, the origins
It was moreover Beethoven more than Schubert who started this tradition of lieder cycles with To the distant beloved. But obviously Schubert, by the enormity of the repertoire, the use of all the poets…
Discover poetry through music
This use of language by Schubert, precisely, is what allowed me to become German-speaking. I had studied German, I had remained insensitive to this repertoire of German poetry. It was necessary, first by Schubert but then by others, Schumann, Brahms, for me to hear this language set to music for me to grasp its beauty and come back to it, Faust from Goethe, for example, to Schiller. It’s a weird process, it was a bit complicated but so I needed German set to music to enjoy German without music!
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, master C) PrismaArchivo/ Leemage via AFP
The people who were on the records at home!
I started to sing Schubert around 18 (I’m almost 40), it was quite natural, I had Alsatian grandparents, my grandfather listened to a lot of lieder by these magnificent interpreters who were Schwarzkopf , Fischer-Dieskau; and it was incredible because when I left to study in Germany, I found myself with as teachers Fischer-Dieskau, Julia Varady, his wife, in short, the people who were on the records at home, at my mother’s . As if, unconsciously, I had sought to encounter the myths of my childhood. I had to digest these meetings, take the time to see them differently to “intellectualize” my practice of singing.
The range of his friends
The question of range is not too much of a problem with Schubert. The Winter Journey is written for high baritone, I’m low baritone. Good! You can always transpose. In fact it is often written for a medium register. He often wrote for his friends, the singers he had on hand, it was not a question of complicating too much, of looking for opera voices. What interested him was to share the music, to make it known too.
Few elements, a few attitudes, a pensive, suffering face, or on the contrary the dark look, the straight neck: Crossley-Mercer, model physique, sometimes a slight smile, like a challenge. Not at all what one tends to hear in “Le voyage d’hiver”, with many Germanic singers. “Le voyage d’hiver”, an icy cycle where, in a nature surrounded by snow, the fountains are stopped. Where “winter kisses whistle in my face”, where “frozen drops fall from my cheeks to the earth”. The texts are by Wilhelm Müller, a young poet who died at the age of 36, a little older (barely) than Schubert.
This man, this wandering traveller, betrayed in love, going from village to village, from cemetery to cemetery (while honest people sleep under their thick duvets), his walking stick hanging in the snowdrifts, becomes, through the voice of Crossley -Mercer, bronze voice with intense colors, strange, chiselled, voice with an almost Faustian depth that lights up like a ray of icy sun, suddenly, an intense high pitch, becomes a resistant, who travels his way to escape a immobility, numbness, which would be fatal.
Yoan Héreau C) MILENAP
To walk, to advance, is not to resign oneself, even if one is confronted with the terrible condition, without hope, of a man who has no place, or no longer has one, on earth. Walk, advance. Like those mountaineers who know that the terrible effort, in extreme conditions, to pursue, to endure, can alone save them from an irrevocable sleep.
And Crossley-Mercer tells it to us, this journey brilliantly put to music by Schubert in tones of dark gray, suspension of the breath, call to heaven, terror and hope, without, for a single moment, failing in the vocality, the intensity of the evocation, the controlled power of the timbre. Supported by a remarkable Yoan Héreau whose piano evokes the harshness of the numb landscape as much as the furious will to live of the traveler. The book-disc, magnificent, includes, one poem per page, superb paintings by the painter Claudine Franck, when the intensity of winter blurs nature before our eyes.
the winter travel by Schubert. Edwin Crossley-Mercer, baritone, Yoan Héreau, piano. In concert at the Folle Journée de Nantes.
With the paintings of Claudine Franck, a CD-book published by Mirare