Five years ago, a striking red tower appeared high up on the Julier Pass in the Swiss Alps. The brainchild and creation of Giovanni Netzer, the 30m-high Julier Tower theatre stands 2300m above sea level and is the venue for Netzer’s Origen Cultural Festival. Made of laminated wood, the tower has a star-shaped footprint with seating for up to 270 people arranged over five floors, each storey punctuated by arched windows that connect the inside to the Alpine landscape that surrounds it. It is a remarkable fusion of the old and the new, and to add to its magic is the element of transience: it will be dismantled later this year and vanish forever.

The baritone Benjamin Appl was giving a masterclass in Basel when one of his students posted photos of the tower on Instagram. ‘I was immediately intrigued. It’s so surreal. I’d never seen anything like it,’ he recalls. A couple of years ago he went there to perform and it proved one of the greatest artistic experiences of his career to date. ‘Everything was so inspiring. What Netzer does is extraordinary. He constructs a stage just for a few weeks in the most amazing places. It may be in the middle of a village, on a frozen lake, on a dam, or high up in the mountains. And it attracts audiences completely different from, say, the ones at big established European festivals. People come for the music, not just to be seen. So, having found this tower, I thought, that’s exactly the place to perform Winterreise. Given the strange times we are living through I’d been thinking about Winterreise a lot, and how its relevance to our time is so heightened. We hear so much these days about climate change, the disappearing ice, the loneliness people are experiencing, the fear of other people, of distance, of rootlessness … And the fact that the tower would be demolished added a sense of urgency.’

Having found his venue and the music to sing there, the next stage was to create a project, and his enthusiasm fired up the film-maker John Bridcut, who has given us so many remarkable documentaries on subjects like Dame Janet Baker, Bernard Haitink, Jonas Kaufmann and Benjamin Britten. The idea developed to capture a performance of Winterreise filmed in and around the tower, the voice recorded in the various chosen settings, the piano recorded in the tower. For the film, called Winter Journey and due for broadcast by the BBC any time now, Appl was joined by his regular piano partner James Baillieu. But, in an embarras de richesses, the two musicians have given us not only that filmed Winterreise, done entirely on location in Switzerland, but also a studio recording made in London within weeks of the film, as the first album of Appl’s new substantial contract with Alpha Classics.

‘Winterreise always gives just tiny hints and it opens your imagination. You can ask thousands of questions – and each question leads to another question’ – Benjamin Appl

Both musicians are totally aware of that strange conundrum at the heart of classical music (and which remains central to what Gramophone does month after month): the constant revisiting of the same repertoire. ‘It’s a question we both ask ourselves,’ Appl freely admitted when we met at Baillieu’s north London house just before Christmas: ‘“Why do we record this cycle again if there are a thousand recordings already? Why exactly in the same order, in the same way, that other people have recorded it?” There are so many existing recordings that everyone listens to, making comparisons between them. But we, as musicians, actually have to free ourselves in our performances, and find our own way. Sometimes maybe it sounds like someone else and sometimes it doesn’t, but we have to be open, and it’s something we have to ask of our audiences too: to be open-minded and receptive. We are not the kind of people who trot out the same thing every time – we look for something new. It’s very tricky where we are right now, as performers. What is our role in all this? What can we contribute to the recording or performing world? And I find that a tricky question to answer.’ Baillieu suggests, ‘I think it’s true that when you embark on a recording you try to look at something in a completely different way from anybody else. But there’s the risk that you can try too hard.’ Appl adds, ‘And it can be a bit desperate.’ Baillieu reveals: ‘When we finished the recording, our producer Jonathan Allen said a very nice thing. He said, “Guys, that is your Winterreise of this week.” And I thought that put it very well, because it could morph, it could change. I mean, in two years’ time, we might hate everything we’ve done, but that’s also OK.’

Benjamin Appl (photo: David Ruano)

Schubert’s Winterreise, 24 songs to words by Wilhelm Müller, was composed about a year before the composer’s tragically early death at the age of 31. In five years’ time – 2027 – it will be 200 years old and yet it remains as fresh, as powerful and as a relevant as the day it was unveiled. And it is also arguably the greatest song-cycle ever written: rather like Bach’s Solo Cello Suites, composers have tried to emulate it, but all attempts fall short. It has become a musical lodestone, attracting baritones and tenors – and a growing number of mezzos, too – as one of the pinnacles of the Lieder singer’s repertoire, a work that remains constantly elusive and defies the ‘definitive’ approach, which no doubt explains its continuing allure for audiences too.

A Winterreise not only in a time of pandemic but also at a time when huge numbers of people have become refugees takes on, perhaps, a different resonance. We have become more aware of our relationships to our fellow humans, and even to the landscape around us. The figure at the centre of Müller and Schubert’s cycle has left his home and village, and as the songs progress, his sense of alienation grows. The words, ‘My feet did not seek rest; it was too cold to stand still. My back felt no burden; the storm helped to blow me onwards’ (from the tenth song, ‘Rast’, in Richard Wigmore’s translation) are as real today as when they were written. ‘Coming back to the text,’ says Appl. ‘I find it very interesting that he is the one who is actually brave. He goes out, he’s searching for light. Here’s someone who looks for light and for a way out. He also criticises society, which is lying in its bed asleep and doesn’t take its own fate into its own hands, or even really ask questions and reflect. He’s the one who goes through this entire struggle, and he’s actually quite a brave man. I often think that Schubert and Müller’s message is also for us.’ Baillieu adds: ‘At this very minute, people are fleeing from Afghanistan, Syria and many other countries. Of course, they’re not being driven by loss of love, but they’re embarking on immense winter journeys, journeys we can’t even begin to imagine. And so it’s a universal topic that has relevance even more so today.’

One baritone who returned to the cycle throughout his career – from fresh-voiced young man singing to fellow prisoners of war in Italy to seasoned artist, nearly 50 years later, with naturally reduced vocal powers – was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He recorded it commercially seven times, with various off-air and pirated versions as supplements. And Appl was Fischer-Dieskau’s last pupil. ‘It was very strange,’ he remembers; ‘although we worked on Winterreise and I was expecting it to be an incredibly fulfilling experience, he gave the impression that he had closed that particular chapter. It was as if he was not emotionally connected to this music in the way that he was, for example, to other Schubert songs we worked on, or to Wolf, or Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, which he was addicted to. I thought in the beginning that it was to do with me or with my singing – that he didn’t like it. I asked him, “Is this the most important music for you?” and he said “No,” in quite a brutal way. And I still don’t know why. I think about it quite often. Maybe it was his mood that day. Yes, we worked through the entire cycle, worked a lot on language, understanding of the text and vibrato – which was always very important to him; but he was somehow quite detached from it.’

Benjamin Appl’s journey of discovery: ‘In Winterreise, you get numerous signposts and many options of going in a different direction’ (photo: David Ruano)

Appl’s first encounters with the cycle did not hint at how significant it would come to be for him. ‘I actually never really listened to it as a young student. I knew certain songs from it – “Der Lindenbaum”, of course, and the first song too. Most people who listen to classical music know those, but I’d never really listened to the entire cycle. I was in awe of this music and was a bit frightened of it, and I didn’t emotionally connect with it as I did with all those many other Schubert songs I was learning as a young singer. Winterreise is also one of those pieces that people always say you need life experience to perform, so very early on that opinion somehow gets planted in you.’

Scheduled to sing it one weekend, he started learning it only days before, initially on a car journey, his father driving, from Heidelberg to their home town of Regensburg. ‘It was a four, four-and-a-half-hour drive, and when we arrived, I had one-and-a-half songs learnt, but I realised I still had 22, 23 more to go! So, each day I sat from 7.30 in the morning till midnight, and I learnt the songs.’ His tried-and-tested method of getting any song under his skin is to write it out. ‘So, I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was such an intense week. I mean, on one hand, it’s terrible to learn this cycle in four-and-a-half days – even on the morning of the concert I had to learn a few of them. But thinking back, it was so amazing to spend such an intense, almost mad time on this cycle. And since then, I’ve performed it quite often.’

For Baillieu, brought up in South Africa, there was something else that stood in the way. ‘I was always quite scared of Winterreise because so much of it is to do with the landscape – and I hadn’t seen snow until I moved to Europe when I was 23. Africa’s a very different experience; there, the sun always comes out the next day! And that makes quite a psychological impact. So this sustained period of barrenness is something that was foreign to me until I moved over to Europe. But also, as with Ben, a lot of people were telling me that you had to live and have a whole world of experience before you learn Winterreise. But then I just did it. We had a small festival, and I thought, “Well, you have to start somewhere!” And that’s how it began.’

Unlike the ‘plot’ of Schubert’s other cycle to words by Müller, Die schöne Müllerin, that of Winterreise remains vague: it’s like a charcoal sketch rather than an oil painting. There’s a narrative, but so many questions remain unanswered. ‘Like no other piece, every time you do it, it’s a different journey,’ Appl suggests. ‘You get numerous signposts – one song is even called “The Signpost” (“Der Wegweiser”) – and many options of going in a different direction. I think that’s what makes it such an outstanding piece. Even with the girl at the beginning, you don’t really know if they were actually properly together. Was it she who broke it up or was it he? It always gives just tiny hints and it opens your imagination. You can ask thousands of questions, and each question leads to another question – which is a wonderful thing, and why people like Fischer-Dieskau and many others could spend their entire lives revisiting the cycle. That is the attraction for an audience, too, and also why there are hundreds of recordings out there. That’s something I find incredibly rewarding: every performance looks different.’

‘It’s amazing that every time you do it’, Baillieu adds, ‘you see one more accent, or one more open fifth or something else that you hadn’t noticed before. And it’s also amazing that you are able to put so much of yourself into the music. It’s genius! And it just encourages a person to interpret, whereas in Die schöne Müllerin, what Schubert puts on the page is quite prescriptive. But in Winterreise there’s a very barren musical landscape: many open fifths, especially in the left hand, the IV–I, V–I quasi-religious cadences that appear in the second half and the continual play-off between major and minor keys throughout – so simple, but so effective.’

Appl and Baillieu have now done Winterreise about 30 times together, often in different presentations. ‘We did it in a version with an Austrian actor,’ recalls Baillieu, ‘where he interspersed a different journey – a catastrophic North Pole expedition, people going through hell. He is a very strong actor and he really inspired us, especially where we have just 42 seconds to make an impression. It was quite a good way of capturing and motivating the songs.’

The filming of Winterreise in Switzerland also gave both artists a face-to-face encounter with the power of snow, as their car was stuck for two hours on their way to the Julier Tower. ‘The cycle’s character exists in the landscape much better than we did,’ offers Baillieu. ‘A connection to the feel of ice and snow in everyday life is what I actually got, for the first time, at the tower. I’ve been skiing before, and travelled in a sanitised way through snow, where you don’t actually engage with it; but there, where we had to dig ourselves out of the car, try to drive down icy paths and push open the door of the tower, having been snowed in, we really experienced a different side of it. The moment you step outside, you’re covered in snow and it’s really not very pleasant. It’s quite a change from it being something beautiful, such as you’d encounter on a ski holiday, to it being something almost brutal and primal.’

Winterreise remains a powerful experience for any audience, an act of connection not only with the singer and pianist, but also with the composer and the poet. Even two centuries on, a fine performance can linger in the memory for a long time, and whether experienced on record or in the concert hall, its totemic power is extraordinary. Appl, whose ability to connect with his audience quickly and comfortably, is an artist who is also approachable off stage, and seeing him sign CDs is to witness another facet of a very modern artist. ‘I think that buying a record after a performance, if there’s a chance to do so, actually allows you take something physically away with you, ideally with the same repertoire and maybe even signed by the artist. It’s always an emotional connection to an event. That’s something you cherish for way longer than listening for five minutes on a streaming service and then moving on to the next track because you want to check the tempo of another performer.’

For Baillieu, who teaches song interpretation at a number of British conservatories, it’s a piece that’s not easy to work on with a student, being best explored from the perspective of a performer rather than from that of a teacher. ‘It’s so personal,’ he says. ‘And I’ve only properly discovered it through repeated performance, where every day can bring something different. So it’s quite a hard piece for someone to teach. There’s something very special about this union of the human voice and a Steinway (which after all was perfected well over a century ago). No app or whatever is going to make it better.’

To have recorded the cycle twice within a few weeks is certainly unusual, and while Fischer-Dieskau had a considerable head start, Appl’s journey with the work has already established a rhythm and life of its own. The very act of recording Winterreise has given us a snapshot of a precious 75 minutes, and yet time continues to move on – though the Julier Tower will cease to exist in a matter of months.

‘Winter Journey’ will be broadcast on BBC Four at 8pm on Sunday, February 27, after which it can be viewed on iPlayer

This interview originally appeared in the February 2022 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today