Schubert: Winterreise (2021)

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is far from the first female singer to undertake Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, D. 911. Although the traveling figure in Wilhelm Müller's texts is definitely male, what strikes one in listening to an unorthodox interpretation like this one, is how little the gender is mentioned; it is the emotions that count. Thus, the issue has simply been left unaddressed, or the figure is sometimes said to be of indeterminate gender, and things work well enough. DiDonato's reading, though, recorded ... Read More

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is far from the first female singer to undertake Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, D. 911. Although the traveling figure in Wilhelm Müller's texts is definitely male, what strikes one in listening to an unorthodox interpretation like this one, is how little the gender is mentioned; it is the emotions that count. Thus, the issue has simply been left unaddressed, or the figure is sometimes said to be of indeterminate gender, and things work well enough. DiDonato's reading, though, recorded live at Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium in 2019 (the space is too large for this work, and there was some coughing), is something else again, something more radical. DiDonato imagines the woman to whom the poems were addressed, having received them in the mail in the form of a journal. In person, this could be shown clearly; a supertitle announced: "I received his journal in the post," and the songs were presented as DiDonato pretended to read them. On a recording, this apparatus is... Read Less