Schubert died at thirty-one, and it shows — not in any sense of incompletion, but in the terrifying speed with which he metabolized suffering into song. He wrote nearly six hundred of them. The question every interpreter faces, every time, is not merely how to sing them but how to inhabit the world they describe: a world where longing is the atmosphere, not the weather.
Matthias Goerne has been working through that world methodically, volume by volume, with different pianists — a structural choice that says something interesting about his view of the repertoire. Lieder is not one relationship but many. Here, paired with Andreas Haefliger, he has found something close to an ideal interlocutor.
Let’s be clear about what Goerne is and isn’t. His voice — a baritone of unusual warmth and interior resonance — is among the most exquisite instruments in the song repertoire today. The tone sits in the chest and blooms upward, never forcing, never quite hardening even under pressure. What he is not is a microscopist of text in the way Christian Gerhaher is, that almost frightening close-reader who makes you feel a single syllable can collapse the world. Goerne works differently. He trusts the melodic line to carry meaning, and — when the melody is Schubert’s — that trust is usually justified.
“Im Abendrot” opens the program and sets the terms immediately. The song is barely four minutes long and contains an entire philosophy of twilight. Goerne and Haefliger find a stillness here that isn’t static — it breathes, very slightly, the way evening air does before it goes cold. Haefliger’s touch is something to remark on separately: he plays with the kind of tonal discrimination that makes the piano sound lit from within, and his voicing of inner lines — often where Schubert does his most subversive harmonic work — is consistently alive.
“Der Wanderer” is the obvious test. Schubert set the same poem twice, used the melody as the basis for the great C major Fantasy, and returned to the idea of the wanderer — the man who belongs nowhere — compulsively throughout his career. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, autobiography. Goerne understands this. His reading doesn’t dramatize the isolation so much as settle into it, which is exactly right: the wanderer’s tragedy is not that he suffers acutely but that he suffers continuously.
Then there are the water songs, which occupy a remarkable stretch of this program. “Die Forelle” — almost insultingly familiar — runs under two minutes here, light-footed and unsentimental, the trout alive in Haefliger’s flickering sixteenth notes. “Der Fluss” unfolds differently: one long melodic paragraph, the piano moving with the unhurried certainty of a river that knows where it’s going. “Der Strom” is something else entirely — darker, more agitated, the current suggesting not peace but dissolution. Goerne drops his voice into a lower register and something shifts. This is a river you wouldn’t swim in.
“An den Mond” is, for me, the disc’s quiet summit. The two performers breathe together here — literally, it seems, the piano’s undulating accompaniment rising and falling with the vocal line in a way that suggests not collaboration but merger. The song asks for the moon’s light to illuminate what daylight cannot, which is roughly what Schubert spent his whole short life asking for.
Not everything sustains that level. “Normanns Gesang” and “Im Walde” are stormier, more extroverted pieces, and while Goerne and Haefliger manage them with skill — the shift into the major in the final verse of “Normanns Gesang” is handled with real grace — these songs feel like interruptions in the prevailing emotional temperature rather than genuine contrasts. Schubert could do turbulence, certainly, but the turbulence here feels less inhabited than the stillness.
“Nachtviolen” is a small miracle of equilibrium — a song that seems to tremble between joy and something that isn’t quite grief, between the waking world and whatever is on the other side of it. Goerne finds exactly that membrane and stays on it. “Alinde,” lighter in character, shows that he can be playful without losing his characteristic gravity.
Competing versions are not hard to find. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings of these songs with Gerald Moore remain touchstones for the sheer intellectual rigor of his textual engagement. Hans Hotter’s recordings from the early 1950s — rougher in surface, deeper in shadow — still disturb in ways nothing else quite does. Thomas Quasthoff, before his voice declined, brought a quality of tragic radiance to much of this material. Goerne belongs in that company without simply imitating any of them.
This is serious Schubert: seriously prepared, seriously performed, and seriously felt. That it doesn’t always reach the highest altitude is not a criticism so much as a measurement — the altitude Schubert set is almost impossibly high. That Goerne and Haefliger get as close as they do, as consistently as they do, is achievement enough. Strongly recommended.
