A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

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This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Beckettt, the alleged adherent to Buddhist thought

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19 November 2011

Brought to you from where I posted the review on Amazon*:

One academic writer, supposed to be an authority on Beckettt's work (see my review of one of his books, Beckettt and Eros), finds - or claims to find - deep Buddhist thought, philosophy, and probably even practice in it.

I wonder if he has considered Waiting for Godot in the following way...


The play has five characters, six if you include the named, waited for and talked-about Godot, who, we are told, has sent the last of them to appear (the Boy) to Vladimir (also known as Didi) and Estragon (also known as Gogo - the full name is the French one for tarragon), who have been (one, then the other) on stage from the start, and almost without break throughout the two Acts (although the end of both is, crucially, different - please see below).

The remaining two characters, Pozzo and Lucky (the atter is also known as 'pig', 'hog', 'scum', and a number of other offensive names, by Pozzo) arrive together, halfway through each Act, but seem mightily changed between them: in fact, we actually have no direct way of knowing how time passes, in this timeless and largely featureless space that keeps the characters in it or draws them to it (or through it), such as these two.

Pozzo is grand, pretentious even, and certainly cruel. However, he may not actually have the power either in the place where we see him, or in the relationship beyond his transit of these lands with the other man, Lucky. (At one point, Pozzo asserts or implies (but he alleges many things that we cannot verify) that this is his part of his land). Even so, he openly abuses Lucky before us, whilst - in the phrase used by another Beckettt writer to describe a scene of reported dialogue in the earlier novel Watt - often employing a 'language of bizarre civility', as well as some of the accompanying manners / mannerisms. His cruelty draws out that, alluded to earlier in speech largely, of Vladimir and Estragon, too.

Beckettt calls Waiting for Godot 'a tragicomedy (in two acts)', but it is often played for pure comedy, which jars with the obvious brutality and unpleasantness of what human beings (Didi (or Gogo) pronounces that 'People are bloody ignorant apes!') do to pass the time when bored, but have to be somewhere.

Are we, perhaps, reminded of the random torture that SS officers and the concentration camps gave rise to (this play was first performed in around 1953 in what had been Nazi-occupied Paris, and Beckettt, who had served in the French resistance - is this where the references (shared by the contemporary novel Molloly) to beatings during the night by an unspecified 'they' come from?), would have had some bitter experiences / memories of the recent war.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage (for the first Act), there is an exchange between the Didi and Gogo that their appearance had passed the time. The retort is that it would have passed anyway, replied to by agreement, but that it would not have passed as quickly.


Another exchange is:
What keeps us here?
The dialogue.
Ah.


This is a play of quick wits, and comments and counter-comments batted back and forth, and one character (probably Estragon) is asked whether he cannot 'return the ball once in a while'.


As has been said, Pozzo and Lucky return, much changed, in Act II - Lucky, who was loquacious on demand, is, if not mute, then does not 'think' for us again on stage as he did before, and Pozzo - we are told, anyway - is blind (so now led by his Lucky, whom he could previously lead before, and jerk quite cruelly to the ground by his rope). Yet Vivien Mercier, another Beckettt 'crrritic' (from when Gogo and Didi decide to play the game of orally abusing each other) trying to be clever, described the play as nothing happening - twice.

When had Act I been? Whenever it was, the title-page to Act II tells us: 'Next Day. Same Time. Same Place.' And this is where the Buddhism trail comes in more clearly: only Vladimir remembers - and does not (really) doubt remembering - Pozzo and Lucky from Act I, but there is scant or no recognition or recollection on the part of the other three (four, when we include the Boy - please see below). He knows that they passed this way the day before, and is appalled at the change (the Buddhist doctrine of and teaching on the transience of all things?), but all the rest muddle through.

Of them all, if he could see this for what it is, he could break through the unreality of life, of striving, of searching after the wrong things, whereas they are locked in it, so busy, seemingly, living these frantic and tortured lives that they have both little self-awareness (a step on the Buddhist path to acquire it). Since they cannot capture the keys and clues to reality, they struggle, battle and scrape on, as if that struggle, battle and scraping, rather than rejecting it as meaningless, is the essence of life, of what life is.

As things stand, Vladimir is doomed to be trying to remind others of their own (past) lives. (This play can, it is argued, be seen as a presentation of a (potential) voyage towards enlightenment - whereas people seeing the play may think that it is for their entertainment (distracting them from life), which is a further distraction, this time from what the narrative thrust (yes, Professor Mercier - there is one!) of the play is trying to focus on.) For he does not twig (yet?) what it means. So this includes interacting with the Boy, who comes (alone, and to him alone) at the end to apologize that Godot will not come that day (after all).

The Boy, as has been seen with the others, has no knowledge that he came at the end of Act I in the same way. In consequence of that, and because Vladimir only knows how to respond by just being frustrated that even this young being is blighted and trapped by not even remembering his own life, he lashes out, orally and physically, against a weaker force, with the brutal streak that we have witnessed - with a shudder? (although Lucky seemed weak, subservient, and capable of being picked on, in Act I, he proved not to be wholly so) - most clearly when Pozzo and he are on the stage.


The play does not end, though, with the frightened Boy running off the stage at what the stage-directions call Vladimir's 'sudden violence' (a contrast both to the placidity of this scene, and to the previous encounter in Act I (although Estragon did then briefly participate, laying hands on the Boy, and accusing him of lying before Vladimir intervenes). It is Didi and Gogo, again, hoping and fearing for another day, for hanging themselves, if they bring some rope, and that maybe Godot will come then, after all, and (they do not specify how) 'We'll be saved'.

Yet the words with which he has, two pages back in the text, heralded trying to grab for the Boy (as Estragon had done in Act I), and sent him running off instead, should ring in our ears:

You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!


He wants, at this stage to be witnessed, to be credited with existing and having existed in relation to another, but needs to let go. His search is for something else. Lewis Carroll had another faith, but wrote (for Isa Bowman, a child friend like the more famous Alice):

Is all our life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the ground with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly, to and fro

Man's little day in haste we spend
And, from its merry noontide, send
To glance to meet the bitter end



End-notes

* A kind person called M. McCartney was moved to add the following comment (on 9 March (2012)):

Fascinating review, well worth following up. But who is the academic you mention, and what is the Buddhist Beckett book? I looked in your reviews, but it isn't there.


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