Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake discuss Schubert’s Winterreise and their decades-long musical partnership
Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake bring their renowned interpretation of Schubert’s Winterreise to New York’s Kaufmann Concert Hall at 92NY on 5 March 2025. Their North American tour takes them to Montreal, Boston and Baltimore, but only New York audiences will experience their masterful performance of Schubert’s great song cycle.
Rick Perdian: What was your introduction to Winterreise?
Ian Bostridge: My journey with it started when I was a student. I don’t know who I first heard perform it in recital, but it was probably Peter Schreier or Hermann Prey. I first sang it in January 1985, during my second year at university. I am glad I learned all the words when my brain was still plastic. Peter Pears once said that a singer had to be over fifty to sing Winterreise because it’s so deep. To me, that always seemed ridiculous.
Julius Drake: I think the very first person I studied Winterreise with was Ian when we began working together in the early 1990s. I’m five or six years older than Ian, but he was this sort of wunderkind when he hit the scene. Winterreise was one of the things that he wanted to work on immediately with me.
RP: Why return to it now?
IB: It’s my job. If you want a philosophical answer, it is because, just as there are certain people I have lived with my entire life, it’s the same with Winterreise. When I started singing the cycle, people thought I was too young, and now they probably think I’m too old. When you live with Winterreise as I have it never gets old or tired.
JD: I’ve been away from Winterreise for a few years, and it’s a pleasure to return to it. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was busy with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, and I have not played the Schubert since then.
Winterreise is like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata for solo pianists or the Bach Chaconne for violinists. It is Schubert working at the very top of his game. They are some of the greatest songs he ever wrote, and I am lucky that it is the backbone of my repertoire. Every time, it’s a privilege to embark on that journey.
RP: Can you speak on your musical partnership?
IB: It’s been a very long time. I married my wife in January 1992 and met Julius that autumn. We did Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge together at a wonderful stately home in Norfolk called Holkham Hall in a concert series started by music promoter Heinz Liebrecht, who had heard me sing on TV. Liebrecht had fled Germany before World War II and was more English than the English.
Liebrecht introduced me to Julius, and we performed with my wife turning pages, which she had never done before. Julius and I bonded musically, and our families did as well. Early in my career, I recall counting that I had sung 49 song recitals, 42 of which were with Julius. So you can imagine we spent a lot of time together.
JD: The great thing about having a partnership over a long period, as mine has been with Ian, is that you know each other so well, you’ve done so many concerts together and been through so many experiences, that you have a freedom in performance you generally don’t have with somebody who you’re working with for the first time. It can happen and feel wonderfully free as well, but usually it’s hard-earned.
RP: Ian, did David Alden’s film version of Winterreise affect your approach to your interpretation of the cycle?
IB: The film had a huge impact. If you watch Over the Top with Franz, Peter West’s documentary about the making of the film, you get a sense of the tension between the musicians and David. However, in the end the expressionist edge David employed in the film had an enormous impact on how I perform Winterreise.
If I listen back to my early recordings, they are sort of naïve and nicely sung in quite a light way. I’m not sure I probed that deeply into the songs, but after the film, I dared far more.
RP: Ian, over time, any voice changes and how has that impacted your singing?
IB: I don’t think about it in terms of my voice. I think about it technically. Your body changes so your voice changes, and you have to approach singing in new ways. I think I sing better now than I did twenty years ago, certainly ten years ago. Partly, it is because I found a new teacher, David Pollard, but also because my voice is richer and louder. I have a wider palette of vocal colors to work with, although I have lost some of the lighter ones. But then I did a recital last night and found the lighter stuff was there, so who knows?
RP: Why is Winterreise such an important part of the repertoire?
IB: If you’re a Lieder singer, it is at the center of everything. It is the peak of the Lieder repertoire, but it comes at the very beginning of Lied as a form in the nineteenth century. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin are earlier, but Winterreise looms larger.
JD: Schubert was in the white heat of creativity. He knew he was dying. The fact that the songs are about a man who is in such a bad way, who is so distraught, moves him to some of his darkest and greatest songs.
RP: Is there one song in the cycle that epitomizes the crux of the entire journey or at which it reaches its emotional peak?
IB: While it’s not the high point, ‘Der greise Kopf’ is the most terrifying. ‘Der Lindenbaum’ has a separate existence due to its popularity, but it’s a cycle with each song leading into the next one.
JD: For me, the emotional peak is ‘Das Wirthhaus’ when the man gets to the stage where he desperately wants to stop and cannot go on. And then he realizes about three-quarters of the way through the song that not even this is allowed him. But then we have ‘Der Leiermann’ at the very end, and how can that not be the peak? It’s such an extraordinary song.
RP: Thank you for talking to me and Seen and Heard International.
Fascinating. Thank you.