Joyce DiDonato is, by her own admittance, not the first mezzo-soprano to tackle Schubert’s Winterreise. She recently took on the challenge at the suggestion of the formidable maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with whom she has been touring the legendary cycle before bringing it to Carnegie Hall. Unlike other mezzos before her, some of which had to suffer heavy criticism for daring to perform this piece that had been explicitly written for a male protagonist (I, for one, am quite fond of the landmark recording by Brigitte Fassbaender, whose visceral Sturm-und Drang interpretation deftly defied gender limitations), Miss DiDonato decided to give her interpretation a very specific dramaturgical context that not only offered her audience an opportunity to view the cycle from a new angle but also enabled her to completely bypass the gender issue.
She set the tone by entering the stage in a long black dress: clearly, she did not intend to impersonate a male character. Her deceptively simple concept became clear when the stage darkened and an upstage projection of the phrase I received this journal … appeared. Using a leather-bound journal as a prop, Miss DiDonato proceeded to sing the entire song cycle (with the notable exception of the final song) as if reading it in real time in the journal, seated at a small table and now and again getting up to lean against the nook of the piano as if it were a book shelf in a library. Intimate lighting conjured a wintry room lit by candlelight. Little by little, a very clear image emerged in my mind: Here was a young widow (that’s my interpretation – Miss DiDonato made no attempt to appear like a young girl and her stately posture and black dress brought me to this conclusion) who had just anonymously received the journal of a young poet whom she had briefly known before her marriage and whose love for her she had either not taken seriously or not been all too keenly aware of at the time, knowing full well that he would never have been considered an eligible suitor. Reading his intimate, fatalistic notes with growing alarm, she finds herself confronted with the tragedy of this deeply sensitive young man who was trying to cope with her rejection but gradually drifted into suicidal melancholy. She cannot help reassessing her own life in light of this discovery – her short-lived, joyless and arranged marriage to an older man, the passive life she had lived, duly doing what was expected of her, ignorant of how much suffering her rejection had caused for a young suitor with whom she might have found a life fulfilled with true love and passion had she not been locked into her sense of duty that ultimately made her a young and childless widow and led a love-stricken young man to committing suicide.
This ingenious solution, inspired, according to Miss DiDonato’s program notes, by her soon-to-be-reprised role of Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther, an opera about another tragic literary figure with a death wish, allowed her to put an exquisite amount of feminine tenderness and poise into her delivery, disrupted here and there by brief emotional outbursts of heavier vocal inflections, like heaves of a sigh or stifled outcries. As she neared the end of the cycle, I thought to myself, “If I am reading her take correctly, she will sing the Leiermann, the cycle’s puzzling and heart-rendering closing number, in the first person, that is, as the woman herself. And she did. Carefully placing the book on the table, she turned to face the audience, nay, the world, a grieving woman in a state of shock who resolves to take her life into her hands and make amends for having gravely misjudged an opportunity that led to fatal tragedy. Addressing an aged, local street musician who is maltreated by everyone and living a miserable life, she ponders the possibility of joining him on the road, singing her songs to his music. What songs, you might ask? There can be no doubt: She will put the doomed young man’s writings to music. In other words, this phenomenally well-conceived evening flipped the cycle towards the end to allow it to come full circle, effectively declaring that what you just heard firsthand will eventually be immortalized as a Lieder cycle. It is an ingenious twist that brought to my mind the conclusion in Richard Strauss’ last opera, Capriccio, where a dispute between representatives of the diverse art forms is resolved with the plan to collaborate on an opera about… a dispute between representatives of said diverse art forms.
With this conclusion, Miss DiDonato put her own mark on Winterreise, joining the ranks of Brigitte Fassbaender, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christian Gerhaher and Ian Bostridge. What’s more, she used it to explicitly address the tenet she has championed throughout her career: that art will always prevail, teaching us empathy and helping us to overcome suffering and remorse. In fact, she IS that woman travelling the world with her music. And it does make a difference, if only for the precious hours of peaceful communion she and her collaborators create in their concerts. We all ought to be grateful.