Schubert: Schwanengesang, D. 957

Schubert’s *Schwanengesang*, completed just weeks before his early death, speaks of desolation and the often unbearable weight of the world. The song cycle’s dark-hued themes inspired tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Lars Vogt to expose their innermost feelings about life’s short span in a performance recorded at Wigmore Hall in November 2021. Many in their audience knew of Vogt’s cancer diagnosis but none knew that he would die just 10 months later. The passing in middle age of a musician of such stature—and a man of the utmost decency—lends an extra poignancy to this recording, as if fate determined that it should be Vogt’s swan song. The duo worked together for more than a decade, during which they grew close as artists and friends. “I will miss Lars a lot,” Bostridge tells Apple Music. “I’ve learnt so much from him in a way that’s difficult to put into words. It’s something you only feel when you’re rehearsing and performing with somebody. I was lucky to spend a week at his festival in Heimbach last year. It was such a beautiful thing. Here were these people who’d grown up making music together, and I didn’t feel like an outsider. I just felt like I was joining in. His approach to sharing and communicating was almost unique.” Schubert’s close integration of voice and piano calls for interpreters of his songs to engage in deep listening in rehearsal and performance. Bostridge recalls how Vogt might suggest an idea about a particular piece that would seem strange or even impossible. “Sometimes it would work and sometimes I’d feel, ‘Oh, I can’t really manage that.’ He wanted to play ‘Die Stadt’ from *Schwanengesang* in a very particular way. We weren’t sure about it at first. So, we experimented, listened to each other, and found something that worked for both of us in the end.” Age and experience are arguably even more important than the listening ear when it comes to lifting *Schwanengesang* off the page. Ian Bostridge, in his mid-fifties at the time of recording the work, brought the advantages of both to the job. His voice had changed considerably since he and Vogt first performed the piece, acquiring warmth and weight while retaining its characteristic clarity. “It’s been interesting,” he reflects. “Things do physically change with the voice, and you have to learn how to accommodate them. The voice is bigger and louder and darker, so you have to learn how to negotiate things that used to be easy and things that used to be difficult that are now easier.” Occasional singing lessons and periods of introspection helped smooth the process. Bostridge’s latest survey of *Schwanengesang* is more intense, richer in expressive detail and emotional contrasts than the fine recording of it he made with Antonio Pappano in 2009. He notes how his interpretation, like his voice, has evolved naturally over time, open to an infinitely complex combination of factors. “I don’t return to a song cycle with a worked-out notion of how it should be,” he says. “It’s that different things occur to you every time you sing a piece because the voice is in a different state, and different things have happened to you in terms of personal experience, or the acoustics are different, which changes how you feel. So, different colors and different emphases and different ways of singing a particular phrase become available because you’re in a certain acoustic. There are things you can do in the Wigmore Hall that don’t work in many other places. It has such an amazing acoustic that being able to float and spin the voice is very easy.” The 14 *Schwanengesang* songs, a compilation of settings of poetry chiefly by Heine and Rellstab, span a gamut of emotions, most of them concerned with love, loss, and longing. “I believe it’s important to inhabit these pieces, not just to sing them,” observes Bostridge. “You have to live it; you can’t just sing on the surface. People sometimes think that this approach leads to too much expressionism. But that was the demand Schubert made of his own singers. This recording with Lars came out of the years we’ve performed *Schwanengesang* together, a work we did more than any other. It’s wonderful performing pieces you know so well because then you can simply leave yourself open to the free play of what happens in the moment.”