Jonas Kaufmann and Die Winterreise

As a frequently lovelorn teenager, I lapped up Schubert's Die Winterreise song cycle. I had the cycle on two LPs (fourth side blank) sung by Hans Hotter, with Gerald Moore and I still have the school exercise book in which I copied the texts of all 24 songs so I could learn the words of Wilhelm Müller's poems. The Hotter version was complemented later with Fischer-Dieskau (of course) and, for a time, with Brigitte Fassbaender. Swayed by some ecstatic reviews, I recently bought a new version of the cycle, with Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch, slightly sceptical that an operatic tenor could supplant Hotter or Fischer-Dieskau in my affections.

But the bass and the baritone are supplanted: Kaufmann is superb in this cycle bringing an ardour and a freshness to the music. Hotter had always seemed to me a bit gruff in parts of this music, and Fischer-Dieskau “too smooth by half”, to use an expression of my mother. And Helmut Deutsch's piano is greatly superior, in my view, to Gerald Moore's somewhat subservient contribution. From now on, for Winterreise it will be Kaufmann. I also have the version by Matthias Goerne, somewhere or other, but I find that Kaufmann's tenor voice more immediately conveys the anguish of disappointed young love.

The 40 years encompassing the final years of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert saw an astonishing flood of really great music from the three composers in their final years in Vienna. Die Winterreise is one of music's truly great experiences and the variety of moods, tonality and emotions contained within the 24 songs lasting around 70 minutes is quite extraordinary and unprecedented. Had Schubert lived …. But what could he have done to follow Die Winterreise, the last quartets and the final piano sonatas?