American baritone Thomas Hampson to unfurl one of Schubert’s most evocative works

Thomas Hampson has guts. Naturally, you would expect that of someone who has been making a living from singing lieder and opera for over four decades. But the 68-year-old American-born, German-resident vocalist has demonstrated a willingness to take the odd leap of faith outside the cloistered confines of the concert hall too. 

“My first visit to Israel was just before the [First] Gulf War when there was the threat of Scud missiles in Israel,” Hampson recalls with a baritone chuckle. “They said: ‘You probably want to cancel,’ and I said, ‘No, why should I?’ I think it is important to bring music to a place that is going through a dark time.”

Which neatly and sadly brings us to the present. Hampson’s next foray over here – he thinks it will be his ninth or 10th professional visit to these shores – sees him team up with internationally renowned Russian-born Israeli pianist Elena Bashkirova – for concerts in Tel Aviv (Charles Bronfman Auditorium) and Jerusalem (YMCA) on January 17 and 18 respectively. It also marks one of the first performances by foreign artists here since the outbreak of the war.

The pair will perform the full complement of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey) song cycle. The set comprises 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller, set to music by Schubert towards the end of his short life. 

The composer’s rapidly failing health may have contributed to the seemingly gloomy spirit that pervades the cycle. So, why proffer works of such an ostensibly dystopian nature to Israeli audiences traumatized by the events of October 7, and the ongoing military activity in Gaza and the North of the country?

Hampson has a very different take on the song cycle’s prevailing mood. 

“In dark times we can immerse ourselves in this beautiful oasis of Müller’s words and Schubert’s music,” he posits. 

He suggests we could all benefit from taking a step back, inward, to mine our own emotional seams. 

“The music can enable us to have a serious conversation with ourselves,” he says, adding there is a yin-yang tightrope to be traversed which could provide some balancing perspective to our current emotional upheaval. 

“The first 13 songs [of Winterreise] speak to the heart, and in the other 11 he takes his wanderstab (hiking stick in German). There is the internal and the external.”

Müller’s poems relate the sorry tale of someone – we are not told if they are male or female, or even their age, although, judging by the romantic subject matter, he or she is probably on the younger side – going through pangs of unrequited love. Our wandering protagonist leaves town for a nocturnal long and winding traipse through the countryside. He mulls over his lost love, the meaning of life, and much betwixt until he eventually comes across a musician, playing the hurdy-gurdy, who exudes a mysterious and possibly threatening air. 

The stranger, described in “Der Leierman,” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”) forlornly and steadfastly works his instrument to uncaring passersby who ignore him and toss nary a sou in his begging bowl. Still, notwithstanding the desperate state of affairs of both characters, Müller leaves us with just a glimmer of hope for a change for the better. The lyrics conclude with: “Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?” our aimless heartsick hero wonders.

Hampson believes there is cause for optimism in there. 

“The Winterreise exudes enlightened spirituality. It is humanistic at its core,” he declares.

In fact, Schubert’s colossus of the lieder repertoire is something of an emotional and sensorial roller coaster. The mood meanders between contrasting, yet complementary, tonal tracks, flitting between major and minor sonic areas. The former normally alludes to sunnier climes, while minor keys convey a sense of sadness and storm clouds a-brewing. 

However, in Schubert’s cycle – and, in fact, in much of the composer’s work in general – the juxtapositions serve more to break against each other and, rather than seasoning the positive vibes with less happy energies, and vice versa, they produce an oxymoronic heightening of ongoing emotional turbulence. There is also a broad range of rhythmic substrata that help the tempi along, and underscore the evolving mood patterns as they interlace.

A moving and ultimately uplifting ride

Hampson feels his audiences in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are in for a moving and ultimately uplifting ride. “The Winterreise is a myriad of individual complaints and search for reasonability. It is not about death as such.” That despite the protagonist’s sorry circumstances. “It is interesting that the cycle never uses the word ‘Tod’ (death) ever,” he notes.

The cycle was very much a product of its early contextual zeitgeist. “At the birth of the 19th century, the birth of the modern, of the birth of individualism, not birth but the new realization of self-determination, there came this huge questioning process of not just right and wrong but even structures,” Hampson observes. “There are marriage structures, society structures, what you are told to do, and what you’re told not to do; what box you have to live in.”

That singular avenue of thought, says Hampson, percolates into Winterreise. 

“It starts with a very personal journey that this young person – I think it’s a man but it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care who sings it – has experienced a kind of death of ideology.” 

Müller’s protagonist, says the baritone, is going through a crisis as he moves through the transitional age gears. “He is experiencing a death of adolescence, a birth of maturity which all of us go through. At some point we go ‘Wow!’ this is a very difficult place called the world, here. They realize that people lie, and why isn’t this true? And why isn’t that person’s emotional context the same as mine, as what we promised each other two weeks ago?” Hampson chuckles. 

That emotional voyage of discovery, he says, informs Müller’s narrative. 

“This person keeps on going and starts having almost what we call borderline subconscious or even insane conversations with natural elements.” Sounds a mite hippie or even New Agey. “This was a very serviceable function of German poetry at the beginning of the 19th century. We took from defined elements of nature the representation of human emotion.”

There are a number of references to Mother Nature’s offerings throughout the cycle. There is a song called “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”), and there is Frühlingstraum (“Dream of Spring”) and “Die Krähe” (“The Crow”). Müller tapped into that and ran with it, and Schubert was duly inspired. 

“We work through the water here, or the brook there, or the Will-o’-the-Wisp there. Whatever natural symbol, it stood for something as a laboratory of human emotion. That’s where these poems come from.”

It all adds up to a compelling romantic adventure into the depths of human despair, but also soaring to great apotheotic stratospheres, with even the odd smidgen of humor dropped into the fabric.

For tickets and more information: jmc.org.il/Wintereise