Although Percy Bysshe Shelley devotes some 60 pages to defining his titular artform in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (written 1821, published 1840), surely his pithiest account is ‘that which enlarges the circumference of the imagination’.Footnote ¹ Imagination in turn is the human mind processing thoughts ‘so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity’.Footnote ² But if colour and other thoughts already are supplied, is imagination short-changed? The mention of integrity discloses the need for a point of reference, one Shelley locates in reason, ‘the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities’. While he avoids placing poetry and music on the same plane, he does suggest close kinship in that both encompass rhythm and melody. Insisting that ‘poetry is connate with the origin of man’, he provocatively likens the individual to a musical ‘instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody’.Footnote ³ Since ‘the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves’, it does not surprise that Shelley disdains translation – in his estimation a ‘vanity’. Engaging in translation, he insists, is ‘as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour’.Footnote ⁴

A variety of factors influence the way we evaluate things, not all of which we pause to consider. In the case of this review, who could have foreseen that the day before I began I would encounter Shelley’s essay? Having done so, is it fair to enlist it given that he addresses his contemporaries and not readers today? If it is fair, are not the visualizations of South African artist William Kentridge for Schubert’s cycle of 24 song a ‘vanity’, Shelley’s violet tossed in the crucible?

Answers demand care, for it would be too easy to declare that Kentridge diminishes Winterreise’s imaginative breadth. And yet, while poignantly beautiful, Müller’s poems and Schubert’s lieder are anything but easy-going. The former portrays a scorned, solitary protagonist’s journey through a frozen landscape into dejection and death, while the latter musically plumbs those subjects. If, as Shelley has it, imagination is the human mind sifting thoughts, shading them, aligning them with others, can one judge Schubert’s processing of Müller’s poems as possessing ‘value’ – to use Shelley’s word – and then assert that Kentridge’s thoughts do not? Whether reviewer or listener-viewer, this is a DVD that poses challenges.

Conceived for the 2014 Aix-en-Provence Festival, Kentridge’s films for Winterreise build on his operatic work beginning with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in 2005, Shostakovich’s The Nose, Berg’s Lulu and, most recently, Berg’s Wozzeck in 2017. In all Kentridge draws on video technology, employing oftentimes edgy black-and-white drawings, surreal juxtapositions and rapidly flowing, occasionally Kafkaesque images. Some may object that he does not take his cue more directly from poet or composer, a point he made clear at a talk he gave at Berlin’s Humboldt University included in his programme note for a 2014 performance of Winterreise with Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterhäuser at Alice Tully Hall. Rather, his motivation was his memory of listening to Winterreise as a child and finding himself ‘back in the old way of listening to lieder – a title, a direction, and then the specifics of each line retreating in a mist of incomprehension’. His words warrant further quotation:

We thus return to Shelley’s ‘mind processing thoughts’ and one more question: does incomprehension aid imagination?

In the accompanying documentary ‘A Trio for Schubert’ – perhaps the best starting place – Matthias Goerne discloses his initial reluctance to agree to the project, fearing the visualizations would diminish poems and songs. Many will be delighted he said yes, and, I daresay, those who initially have misgivings likely will come around, at least most of the time. Yet I do have one bone to pick with Kentridge: his claim that his contribution yields ‘a celebration of incomprehension’ is inaccurate, for he understands a great deal, starting with his images moving in conjunction with the music. Some, however, will be less pleased with or simply confused by the film’s often strong autobiographical element. Indeed, in the documentary Goerne describes the project as Kentridge’s journey, one that parallels Schubert’s (he doesn’t mention Müller), although one is left to ponder what composer or poet would have made of the interjection of issues pertaining to South African history or the artist’s walking in silhouette against the turning pages of a book, both of which frequently recur. No doubt many will register more-than-occasional visual overload, if for no other reason than at a performance venue one could focus on singer, pianist or projections for as long as one wished. The film, of course, impels one to look at whatever is at camera’s end. But there is little doubting Kentridge’s seriousness of purpose. Whether it is possible always to agree with him needs to be left to each of us.

Seriousness of purpose certainly typifies the stunningly persuasive performance Goerne and Hinterhäuser turn in, one in which the range of emotions they traverse and the finesse with which they do so is nothing less than extraordinary. Goerne can move from the softest dynamic to a thunderous, frightening roar with ease, all while keeping his artistry intact. This notwithstanding, Werktreuer devotees may occasionally shake their heads, as in ‘Wetterfahne’, where at the third stanza’s start, which Schubert marks leise, the two indulge in an abrupt slowing down not indicated in the score. To many this decision will seem counterintuitive, because the poetic protagonist, after addressing himself in the first two stanzas in the third person, changes to the first personal objective, the better to express his enflamed, angry energy, which probably should have occasioned something other than a slackening of tempo. (Also in this song, Hinterhäuser’s octave trills in both hands sound oddly out of sync (bars 4, 5, 35, 36, 50 and 51).) Impressive although Goerne’s dynamic gradations are, he often does not take his cue from Schubert, as at the start of the fourth stanza of the fourth song where he begins singing forte five bars before called for, and, in the event, produces what is really a fortissimo. There are other liberties, too, but to adduce them would be to engage in uncharitable nit-picking if for no other reason than that it doesn’t take long for the sway and strength of the pair’s performance to push aside questions of score fidelity. In any case, performative freedom, at least up to a point, was understood to be the musician’s prerogative in nineteenth-century music.

What I hope will move the listener-viewer is the passionate dedication of singer and pianist to convey soul-searching verse and music. Subtle though its first intimation is, the range of Goerne’s timbral shadings as the protagonist increasingly falls into the void of madness makes for a musical journey within the larger poetic sojourn, first discernible in ‘Irrlicht’, song 9. While Schubert builds that progression into his music in a variety of ways, Goerne negotiates it deftly, introducing a slight lessening of a note value here, one free of vibrato elsewhere, or both at once, all apt responses to the increasing chill of Müller’s verse. Too, their pacing is at once riveting and heart-breaking, with one song standing out because it is set in relief with another either before or afterwards. Again, credit must be given to Schubert, yet singer and performer clearly understand their composer. A turning point is reached in ‘Der Wegweiser’, the twentieth song, where the protagonist longs for companionship yet finds only signposts pointing toward the prospect of such. Mirroring those possibilities in the first strophe, the vocal line pursues a variety of notes yet by the concluding fourth becomes caught on a single note like an insect on fly paper. This expressive leave-taking portents the near-consistent pianissimo Goerne and Hinterhäuser maintain throughout the final song, ‘Der Leiermann’, and in which, in imitation of the hurdy-gurdy’s distinctive drone, the same open fifth is present throughout the lied’s 61 bars. By means of nearly motionless music, Schubert captures death in song, consummately aided by his interpreters.