The great German baritone Matthias Goerne is visiting the Lanaudière Festival this week. He will sing “Les Adieux de Wotan,” a great Wagnerian moment, with Rafael Payare on Friday. As a “bonus,” the Festival management managed to get him to give a recital of songs, and not just any song, since he will sing The beautiful miller’s wife by Schubert on Tuesday at the church of Saint-Sulpice.
Matthias Goerne is very brave and generous to come and sing a Songs of the Night in Quebec. In 2010, the Domaine Forget International Festival was proud to have made him its special guest for a recital of Brahms and Schumann melodies. The attendance flop of this concert, one of the major posters of the Quebec summer that year, has remained legendary in the memories of the music world.
With The beautiful miller’s wife, and in a church, it should be okay this time, even if this concert, announced for July 4, does not appear in the brochures of the 2024 Festival. Matthias Goerne is an authority on German Lied, which German-speaking countries distinguish by the name of Chamberlainthat is, “chamber singer,” a vocal equivalent of what a large string quartet is to instrumental music.
At the opera too
Matthias Goerne is so associated with the world of Lied that it is difficult to find an operatic role that he has particularly left his mark on, even though he has had a career on both fronts. We must not forget that this baritone, born in Weimar in 1967, has notably sung Mozart (a typical and splendid Papageno by The Magic Flute) at its beginnings in the mid-1990s, and has now reached the Wagnerian universe, where he embodies the god Wotan, recorded under the direction of Jaap van Zweden.
One of his greatest roles, if not the greatest, is that of Wozzeck, in the opera of the same name by Alban Berg. It was fortunately immortalized on DVD (HM) in Salzburg in 2017, in the production by William Kentridge with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Of this opera, Goerne said in an interview with France Musique: “The degree of significance of Wozzeck is so high that it makes it a play on all of humanity: as long as there are humans, there will be oppression and social discrimination.”
Tracking down the degree of meaning of things, the relationship between words and music, is the essence of the art of the melodist. Goerne has been an immovable pillar of reference for almost three decades, through recordings published by Decca, then Harmonia Mundi. In 2023, this label brought together the eleven Schubert CDs recorded by Goerne in a very attractively priced box set that can still be found in some stores, here and in Europe. Matthias Goerne is now a Deutsche Grammophon artist, where he delighted us in particular with an album of orchestrated melodies by Franz Schreker (The ferne sound) and Schubert in 2023.
The beautiful miller’s wife is the first of what is somewhat wrongly referred to as the three Schubertian “cycles”. Wrongly, because The song of the Swanstuck between The beautiful miller’s wife And The winter journeyis actually not a cycle, but a collection. By “cycle” we mean both a story and a psychological journey. The difference between The beautiful miller’s wife And The winter journey is that the first leads from the most vivid hope to despair, while the second declines shades of despair to the aspiration of death.
The beautiful miller’s wife has always occupied a special place in the repertoire, precisely because of the diversity of romantic feelings that punctuate the 20 melodies describing the journey of an apprentice arriving at a miller’s, falling in love with his daughter, who will very quickly prefer the hunter. The young man will go and mope and then drown in sorrow in the stream. We will note, throughout, the symbolism of this stream which guides the journey and reflects the moods of the protagonist.
This cycle has greatly inspired singers. Among the references, the versions of the tenor Fritz Wunderlich and several of the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Four modern versions stand out: Matthias Goerne, Christian Gerhaher and two very recent ones, Andrè Schuen and Samuel Hasselhorn.