Schubert Winterreise – Peter Anders

Some recordings arrive freighted with more history than any performance ought to have to carry, and this Winterreise is one of them. Berlin, early 1945. The city coming apart at the seams, Russian artillery already audible some nights, and here is Peter Anders, one of the great German tenors of the century, threading his way through Wilhelm Müller’s frozen landscapes as though the Reich weren’t collapsing outside the studio doors. Michael Raucheisen at the piano — dogged, resourceful, a little obsessive in the best sense — kept making these recordings because somebody had to.

I don’t bring this up to excuse anything about the rendition. It needs no excusing. But context matters, and this context is almost unbearably vivid. You listen to “Gute Nacht” knowing what was descending on the city outside the studio walls.

What strikes me first, on musical terms, is the voice itself. Anders started out lyric and grew, over the years, into something more heroic. You can hear the Wagnerian tenor he was becoming laid right alongside the Schubertian he’d always been. That’s unusual casting for this cycle, which in the twentieth century became almost proprietary territory for baritones and basses — Fischer-Dieskau most famously, but also Hotter, and later Fischer-Dieskau again and again, since the man seems to have recorded it every decade he was alive. Hearing it in the tenor register, in Schubert’s own keys, changes the emotional temperature completely. The Wanderer sounds younger. More combustible. Less philosophical resignation, more raw nerve.

Anders can be stentorian. There’s real heft and squillo in songs like “Der stürmische Morgen,” where he opens the voice out with an almost operatic disregard for parlor decorum, and some listeners raised on the hooded introspection of Fischer-Dieskau’s later recordings may find it too much, too extroverted for what’s supposedly an interior journey. I’d push back on that. Müller’s poems are not gentle. There’s fury and derangement in this cycle, and a tenor willing to sing out, to risk stridency, gets closer to that derangement than the murmured confidences we’ve grown accustomed to.

And then he can go the other direction entirely. “Frühlingstraum” is sung at a true pianissimo, mezza voce, no crooning, no fudging of pitch to fake the soft dynamic the way lesser singers do. The support is all there, the line stays taut. It’s the kind of soft singing you don’t hear enough of anymore, partly because it’s genuinely difficult and partly because microphones have made it unnecessary to develop. Anders didn’t need the microphone as a crutch. His diction, too, is remarkably clean. Every consonant lands, nothing gets swallowed, and yet the legato never suffers for it.

Raucheisen has sometimes been treated as a mere accompanist, a journeyman who happened to be in the right studios at the right moments, and that’s unfair. Listen to what he does under “Der Leiermann” — the hurdy-gurdy fifths given just enough hesitation, just enough emptiness, to suggest a man playing an instrument that’s already given up. He follows Anders’s tempo fluctuations — and there are plenty; this is a swift, urgent traversal of the cycle, nothing indulgent about it — with the kind of responsiveness that comes only from having done this hundreds of times with dozens of singers.

Sound quality is better than you’d expect, given the era and equipment. This was recorded on the new magnetic tape technology rather than direct-to-disc, and you can hear the difference: less surface noise, fewer of the pops and gouges that plague contemporaneous shellac recordings. There’s some distortion when Anders opens up on top, a bit of sputter on the sibilants, and in “Im Dorfe” a faint pre-echo that will bother anyone with sensitive ears and good equipment. None of it is disqualifying.

Where does this sit against the field? Not with Fischer-Dieskau’s classic accounts with Moore or Brendel — those remain, for most listeners, the reference points, endlessly re-recorded and refined into something almost too polished. Not with Wunderlich either, whose voice Anders’s sometimes resembles in its lyric warmth, though Wunderlich never lived to record the complete cycle and we’re left forever wondering what he’d have done with it. Anders did live to do it. Barely, as it turned out. A car crash killed him in 1954, another German tenor gone at forty-six.

This is not a Winterreise for people who want beauty smoothed into consolation. It’s rawer than that, more dangerous, sung by a man whose own city was on fire while he sang it. Get it for the history if you must. Stay for the singing.