Schubert’s Winterreise is listed under the catalogue number D911 as part of the Deutsch-Verzeichnis, the method by which all his works are uniquely identified. More often than not, this sole work occupies a whole evening’s recital, though it is in fact a song cycle consisting of twenty-four separate items. For this musical journey with Benjamin Appl and his accompanist Simon Lepper, Wigmore Hall needed a programme running to twelve pages to encompass a total of thirty-eight items, all gathered under the theme of “Lines of Life”. That’s quite an achievement, perhaps worthy of an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. The music itself spanned more than a century, starting with the greatest Lieder composer of all, Franz Schubert, all the way to György Kurtág, born in 1926 and now as the grand old man of Hungarian music just a few months away from celebrating his own personal century. And since journeys of exploration so often take in both highways and byways, it also wasn’t surprising to find the name of Hanns Eisler, who later became one of the leading musical figures in the German Democratic Republic, represented here. Appl’s navigational aids were not the only way to chart a journey, but the signposts were as intriguing and challenging as the names which Schubert used in Winterreise to plot his own path of discovery.
Juxtaposing Kurtág, a man Appl credits with shaping him as a musician and person like no other, and Schubert in the first half of this recital said a lot about this singer’s appetite for seeking out convergence as much as divergence. Schubert needs just a minute and a half in Rastlose Liebe to compress a single idea, that of restless love, into a flood of energy and passion; Kurtág’s miniatures are over and done with in not much more time than that. The opening Circumdederunt is based on a Gregorian chant and focuses entirely on the sorrows of death filling the narrator with distress before his cries are finally heard. This kind of suffering wends its way through most of Schubert’s songs, adumbrated most obviously in the figure of the wanderer, all at sea, both physically and emotionally, in the real world, and seeking solace in an imaginary conversation with the beyond. This is at the heart of Der Wanderer an den Mond : Hello, can you hear me out there? Can you understand what I’m going through? Is there any comfort you can give me?
In a song recital the voice is of course everything. Appl’s instrument is currently in wonderful form: the beauty of tone, the evenness of line, the seamlessness of his transitions, the extraordinary breath control, the immaculate intonation. It displays that remarkable sheen you find on an antique mahogany sideboard, reflecting the solidity and warmth of the grain. Appl’s clarity of articulation, especially at the lower end of the dynamic scale, was heard to notable effect in the clutch of Kurtág songs, most of which were unaccompanied, where reining in the individual sounds heightened their dramatic effect. In Das Angenehme dieser Welt I treasured the sudden dip into sotto voce for “Ich bin nichts mehr” (= I am nothing anymore) and its morendo conclusion. Kurtág’s substantial work here were the Sechs Hölderlin-Gesänge. Using texts by the great German Romantic poet, to whom Hindemith, Eisler, Britten, Rihm were all drawn, Kurtág’s music gave Appl endless scope for varied colouring, the technique of Sprechgesang in Im Walde, sudden outbursts of agitation and passion, such as the single word “Verwegner!” to chastise the foolhardy who outreach their own capabilities, as well as melting head tones to charm the ear. The phrase “The lines of life” is the direct opening of An Zimmern, and the intensity of melismas around the words “Linien” and “Frieden” brought with them an almost endless extension in time. The final song, where Kurtág substitutes instead of Hölderlin a poem by Paul Celan, Tübingen, Jänner, ended with a vivid portrayal of a man dying on the gallows, the sounds increasingly strangulated, the final words “Pallaksch, Pallaksch” spat out with venom by Appl.
Moving successively from Kurtág to Schubert brought a kind of soothing balm in contrast to the sharp directness of Kurtág’s compositions: closing the sequence of Schubert songs, the Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen, came the closest during the course of the evening to a gentle lullaby. I wasn’t entirely happy with Simon Lepper’s accompaniment to the Schubert collection, sometimes more assertive than the music required, bathing the music in primary colours rather than the world of pastel shadings and dark hues that this composer inhabits, and prone to instances of over-pedalling. He was much better at conveying the rusticity of the sequence of Brahms folk songs which opened the second half, relishing the opportunities for tintinnabulation in Liszt’s Ihr Glocken von Marling and the very watery, impressionistic start to Lasst mich ruhen. Appl was equally at home in all these songs. Popular perceptions of Liszt focus on the flashy virtuoso pianist and the progenitor of large-scale narrative tone poems. However, in addition to his songs he also wrote a large number of sacred choral pieces. This prayerful quality was there in abundance for Du bist wie eine Blume, where the closing line of “So rein und schön und hold” was delivered with absolute evenness.
The singer’s ability to characterise so persuasively, evident earlier in Brahms’s Wie komm ich denn zur Tür herein, in the dialogue between a half-witted suitor and his sweetheart, culminating in her exasperation at his lack of practical common sense, turned Liszt’s Die Loreley into a mini-drama. His honeyed tones at the outset, mirroring the calm and tranquil River Rhine, slowly gave way to the sinister implications of the siren about to unleash her potency over unwary sailors, Appl’s cry of “Gewaltige Melodei” filling the hall with amplitude.
Many of Hanns Eisler’s songs are like snapshots of a bygone age, peculiarities of the moment captured in words (often those of his friend and collaborator Bertolt Brecht) and music. Like the 46 or so album pieces written during the wartime years spent in exile in Santa Monica and assembled under the title Hollywood Songbook. This title is something of a misnomer, since these songs are not about glitz and glamour but the revulsion Eisler felt at unfolding events in Nazi Germany and the nostalgia for a cultural tradition which seemed all but lost. One of these songs hinted at a closing of the circle which had started with Schubert’s wanderer. Here, in An den kleinen Radioapparat, there is another being outside the self with which the narrator is communing: not any representations of the universe beyond but an instance of technology, the wireless set, which was a constant companion for this saddened expatriate. His deep-seated wish is for this piece of apparatus to keep going so he can keep in touch with his homeland.
At the start of this final group of songs I became very aware of the way in which Eisler himself stands in the long German tradition of the Kunstlied (= art song), in which lyrical fervour is matched by a deep insight into the human condition. Seizing on the nasty after-taste of twelve years of barbarity, Brecht’s text and Eisler’s music in Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe offer a heartfelt appeal to summon up all the reserves of decency, expressed by Appl with quiet dignity and conviction. He had the full measure of Berlin dialect too for Mutterns Hände, with a constant smile in the voice, and captured all the poignancy present in the closing line of Lied einer deutschen Mutter, where the nightmare of her son’s soldier uniform becomes the mother’s certainty that it will be his burial shroud.
Appl chose to conclude his recital with Ballade zum Paragraphen 218, a reference to the section of the German Penal Code which still classifies abortion as an unlawful act, consisting of an imagined dialogue between a doctor and his patient. Written when Nazi stormtroopers were not only a scourge of the streets but a portent of how that ideology was driving the country towards violence and war, the song contains a savagely sarcastic reference to the child growing inside the woman’s belly as “cannon fodder”, which it is her duty to supply. Again, in a wonderful example of characterisation, Appl conveyed in savage and sneering tones of degradation and heartlessness, how easy it is to lapse into inhumanity.
In his works Brecht constantly railed against what he called “das Kulinarische”, the unreflecting consumption of hedonistic pleasures, without any input of rational intellectual thinking. In this wide-ranging traversal of creativity over the ages, Appl provided plenty of food for thought.
Alexander Hall
Lines of Life
Kurtág, Circumdederunt – Schubert, Der Wanderer an den Mond – Kurtág, Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen; Das Angenehme dieser Welt; Nun versteh‘ ich – Schubert, Frühlingsglaube – Kurtág, Sechs Hölderlin-Gesänge – Schubert, Die Liebe hat gelogen; Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen – Kurtág, Die Rosen; Die Zeit; Ich weiß nicht; Physalis alkagengi – Schubert, Liebesbotschaft (from Schwanengesang); Rastlose Liebe
Brahms, Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund; Erlaube mir, feins Mädchen; Mir ist ein schöns brauns Maidelein; Sonntag; Da unten im Tale; Wie komm ich denn zur Tür herein; In stiller Nacht – Liszt, Du bist wie eine Blume; Ihr Glocken von Marling; Im Rhein, im schönen Strome; Lasst mich ruhen; Die Loreley – Eisler, Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe; An den kleinen Radioapparat; Mutterns Hände; Lied einer deutschen Mutter; Die Pappel vom Karlsplatz; Was möchtest du nicht?; Ballade zum Paragraphen 218
Benjamin Appl (baritone) – Simon Lepper (piano)
Wigmore Hall, London, 20 June 2025
Top image: Benjamin Appl at Prinzregententheater-Munich (2020) courtesy of the artist