Tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson sings Schubert’s »Winterreise« 20 times in a row at Beethovenfest 2022, almost without a break. What does this do to the dramaturgy of the cycle and to the audience?
»I am fixated on the idea that Winterreise never ends,« says Benedikt Kristjánsson, explaining the basic idea behind his Winterreise perpetuum at Beethovenfest Bonn. And he takes it seriously: after the last chord of Leiermann, the last song in the cycle, the 35-year-old tenor does the same as the person being sung to here and immediately starts all over again with what he already knows. Kristjánsson goes round in circles with the cycle, »and his lyre never stands still«.
The Icelander wants to keep singing like this for 24 hours, starting on Saturday evening with pianist Fabian Müller in the emptied-out, covered swimming pool of the Viktoriabad, which has been converted into a stage, directly under the five-metre diving tower, then at some point in the early hours of the morning singing alone and running from the centre of Bonn to the small Beethovenhalle, where the final concert is to take place on Sunday evening – now again with Fabian Müller. On the blue tiles of the swimming pool in the Viktoriabad are not only the musicians and a grand piano, but also a chair, a table with four cans of Red Bull, apples, a few bottles of water, snacks (dried and salted ham, as Kristjánsson reveals to me afterwards) and the sheet music from Winterreise and: a toilet cubicle. Because Kristjánsson has no intention of leaving the stage before sunrise.
In its vocal slenderness and fine detail, his Winterreise tonight is reminiscent of Mark Padmore’s, though the trepidation and empathy is even more gripping, especially in the sometimes crystal-clear high registers. Kristjánsson’s journeyman is very young. And completely unaffected. The tenor lends sharpness and a penetrating sound to the high notes, which we are used to hearing as squeezed out screams in other interpretations, but uses considerably less pressure than other singers. There are also very pragmatic reasons for this in such a singing marathon, Kristjánsson reports on Sunday:
»Yesterday was my first Winterreise and I knew I had a lot to do afterwards. Even though I didn’t want to hold back consciously, it’s in my head and I’m saving up.«
It’s a bit as if the traveller, when he talks about the tears he cries or the crow that travels with him, is not talking about events that are haunting him at the moment he is singing on his way, but rather those that happened a long time ago but are still very present in their intensity when he is telling the story. Another of Kristjánsson’s favourite roles may also play a part in this perception: As a »born evangelist«, he made a name for himself during the pandemic with a St John Passion for just three musicians (with himself as the only singer). He is known as a reporter. The fact that events which, in his »Winterreise«, seem to have been going on for years (and not just the few months between May and the onset of winter) are still so painful to the traveller is all the more moving in this version. In the very first passage of Winterreise perpetuum, Kristjánsson’s equally distant and intense interpretation alone creates the image: there is no way out, we have been stuck in pain and memory for a long time.
»The cycle ends with a question mark«, Kristjánsson tells me a day later. »There is no redemption. And that’s just my thought: I’m just going to keep doing it because you’re stuck.«
By the end of »Der Leiermann«, many in the packed concert hall have already raised their hands in applause during this magnificent first round. But the singer does not let this happen and seamlessly continues with »Fremd bin ich eingezogen«, this time without a piano. There was a breathless silence, nobody clapped. Many people dropped their raised hands in amazement, one gentleman even silently clasped them together over his head in despair. My neighbour complains, whispering: »But I want to clap, he did such a good job!« The programme announced a 24-hour performance, but either nobody had read it carefully enough (with »Winterreise«, you usually know what’s coming), or they simply couldn’t imagine that the singer would really be singing through without a break. After his colourful and perfectly coordinated playing with Kristjánsson in the first round, pianist Fabian Müller now sits on the piano stool with folded arms and finally, audibly, walks through the audience to the lyric line »Was soll ich länger weilen, dass man mich trieb hinaus?« (»Why should I stay as I am driven away?«) No one joins him yet. Meanwhile, Kristjánsson sinks into the chair in front of him, singing. He holds a crutch in his hand, not a prop but a necessity: A few days earlier, the tenor had injured himself during a performance, forcing the cancellation of the actual tour through Bonn, but here on stage Kristjánsson wants to hold out as long as possible with the injury. During the second song, which he sings alone, the breathless silence in the audience gives way to anxiety, people look around and whisper. A neighbour in the audience is shocked and says: »I don’t think he’s going to stop singing!« In line with the lyrics »What are they asking about my pain«, the first people leave the theatre. A little later, the rest of the audience tries to clap, but quickly stops when the tenor just keeps on singing, completely ignoring the applause. Many in the audience clearly do not know what to do with themselves. Most of them avoid just sitting there by taking out their mobile phones and filming.
Without a pianist, Kristjánsson no longer addresses his Winterreise to the audience. From a gripping narrator, he becomes a seemingly drunken man talking to himself, really saying the same thing over and over again.
»Without the piano, it’s no longer Schubert. That’s why I wanted to make a clear break: Now it’s introverted singing, a much slower variation that is hummed by itself.«
The tenor sometimes wavers in tempo, remains quiet throughout, sometimes marking the notes rather than singing them. The fact that he also catches the peaks in a babbling manner, as if the voice were breaking out in suppressed sobs, makes the whole thing almost more haunting – as does the fact that he also manages to convey words and emotions in this mode over the rustling of the walkers and completely without any eye contact. Kristjánsson, who sings by heart throughout, inadvertently leaves out two songs in this first a capella round. »But I don’t think that happened to me again after that,« he says looking back. As a listener, you’re not even sure yourself: did you just miss these songs because you were thinking or even dozed off for a moment? What did you actually hear in this round and what did you just hear? Everything becomes blurred. Everything is spinning.
Kristjánsson begins to stagger around the pool despite his crutch, looking like a caged panther in a zoo, in one of those tiled interiors you find in predator houses. By the end of the second session, there are only six other guests in the pool apart from him.
»The basic idea is great because this situation was so incredibly uncomfortable for the spectators«, says Kristjánsson. »Some are very stubborn, want to stay until the last song and then: No! Not even then!«
Because after the second Leiermann, it starts all over again. Now all but one last member of the audience leaves the hall.
Sometime in the third round, Kristjánsson takes his first break, goes to the provided toilet, eats an apple, then picks up a note from the piano and continues singing.
»I had actually planned to take a ten-minute break every hour«, he says later. But I didn’t at first because I realised: People want to clap and I want to avoid that. So I kept going.«
Meanwhile, in the children’s pool next door, separated by a wall of glass, a party by the Chin Chin collective has begun. A bearded figure in red swimming trunks and leather armour is DJing, house music blaring through the windows.
»Many moments took on a different meaning«, Kristjánsson recalls on Sunday. »It always depended on what was going on in the room. When the party started, ›Ein Licht tanzt freundlich vor mir her‹ (›a light dancing in front of me‹) was pure absurdity. ›Es schrien die Raben vom Dach‹ (›The ravens were screaming from the roof‹) – and in the next room there was naked karaoke. And also ›Eine Straße muss ich gehen, die noch keiner ging zurück‹ (›I have to go down a road that no one has ever travelled‹), but I was always going round in circles. And ›Nun weiter denn, nur weiter, mein treuer Wanderstab‹ (›Now on, just on, my faithful walking stick‹), and I had the crutch, which was also very graphic, of course. And ›so zieh ich meine Straße dahin mit trägem Fuß‹ (›so I go my way with lazy feet‹).
The tenor keeps going until half past four in the morning, but he doesn’t know how many times he sings Winterreise that night. »I didn’t count the runs. I don’t think it was more than 20.«
As the foot injury makes walking impossible, Kristjánsson sleeps a few unscheduled hours before he starts singing again alone in the Kleine Beethovenhalle on Sunday afternoon and continues until the performance ends with the actual final concert.
His solo today seems less crazy than last night, more exhausted and therefore sadder. As more and more people enter the hall, the tenor becomes quieter rather than trying to drown out the noise. An elderly lady next to me asks the person sitting next to her:
»The newspaper said he hadn’t slept. I don’t understand why? Then he's going to sing like shit now, isn’t he?«
The question is justified, but the concern is unfounded. When pianist Fabian Müller finally returns to the stage, Kristjánsson seems to have changed. He makes eye contact, sings with more vigour and emphasis than at the first concert the day before. The whole thing seems like a leap back in time: to the beginning, shortly after the break-up of Wanderer, when the wounds were still very fresh.
»Today was the last time, I wasn’t afraid and I gave it my all«, says Kristjánsson after the concert. »And my voice was so tired anyway that sometimes I had to push to make the notes come out.«
More risky than the high notes in this final concert seem to be the low notes, which sound very thin and pale, in keeping with the protagonist’s longing for death. After the last notes of the Leiermann, Kristjánsson seems above all to have been redeemed. Fabian Müller, too, seems visibly pleased that his partner has held out, and the audience is finally allowed to applaud for several minutes in a standing ovation.
After a night of Kristjánsson’s Winterreise for tenor, one wonders why this cycle is now so firmly in the hands of baritones. After all, Schubert himself wrote this work for tenor, and a high, still somewhat boyish voice is much better suited to a travelling companion than the more mature low register we are used to. Kristjánsson’s clear timbre speaks of a youthful existentialism that you can only feel when you fall deeply in love for the first time, and the shattering aftermath, when you think you’re going to die of a broken heart but then don’t. After this evening in Bonn, the well-known baritone versions of Winterreise seem a little like the lamentations of wealthy gentlemen in midlife crisis, who are also unpleasantly hot-tempered in between. The actor Charly Hübner once described Winterreise in VAN as a »late pubescent boy’s fantasy«. And anyone who sounds like a man in his late forties makes this late-adolescent emotional turmoil sound more embarrassing than moving. Schubert himself was only thirty when he composed Winterreise, as was Wilhelm Müller when he wrote the lyrics.
For both Benedikt Kristjánsson and pianist Fabian Müller, the Bonn performance of Winterreise was their first time on stage.
»The piece is such a highlight«, says the tenor. »I was afraid of failure, and that’s why I wanted to do a project like this, where I could only fail – but also only win. Because now I can say: The next time I do Winterreise, it’s crystal clear what I want to do with the dramaturgy.«
Kristjánsson understands some of the songs and their place in the cycle much better after these 24 hours:
»Stürmischer Morgen« and »Mut«, these two short, fast, aggressive songs, come at a time when you first think: ›OK, I can’t do anything with this.‹ And now I get it. »Wirtshaus« is the peak for me, the climax, because there is this chorale: Now comes my redemption at last. Now I can die. With Schubert, death is always in a major key.«
And then death doesn’t follow:
»›Are all the rooms in this house occupied? You’re turning me away! Now go on, just go on ...‹. And it is so inexorable, so terrible. And then the next song: Mut, courage. ›If the snow flies in my face, I'll shake it off.‹ So: I still have to deal with the problems here on earth, shake off the snow. No redemption, no peaceful end, you’re just still here. And that sucks!«
Kristjánsson hopes to evoke a similar feeling in the audience with Winterreise perpetuum:
»People go to the concert and say afterwards: ›Oh, it was so great.‹ ›And what was there?‹ ›Jonas Kaufmann.‹ ›And what did he sing?‹ ›I don’t know, it was Jonas Kaufmann.‹ The music doesn’t matter and I think that’s a shame. I don’t think it’s a new development, it’s always been the case that for a certain audience the performers are much more important than the music. That’s why I think it’s nice that this trial has forced people to look at Winterreise from a different perspective. The people who thought they were allowed to clap, and who weren’t, go home frustrated: what is this nonsense? But the cycle ends with a question mark. There is no redemption. There is no ›good night, good night, close your eyes‹ as in ›Die Schöne Müllerin‹«.
The reaction of uninitiated, casual listeners to Kristjánsson’s Bonn tour would have been fascinating, especially those who are not yet familiar with Winterreise. Precisely because this tenor sings with such urgency and at the same time with little affectation and very good intelligibility, the songs could also be touching and captivating for passers-by. And even if the singer were to be ignored or perceived as a disturbance, this would be in keeping with the content of Winterreise.
Kristjánsson can well imagine repeating the project, but not for a whole 24 hours:
»Of course you can always make things more extreme. You can sing for 48 or 72 hours, but that makes no sense. If I did it for 10 hours at the weekend, maybe starting at 6 pm, I’d be finished at 4 in the morning. So there would be the hope that maybe ten people could see the end, experience some kind of redemption.«
The journey would end at four o’clock on the dot, no matter where you were in the cycle.
»Not ›Leiermann‹. Just end where I am. Then there would be a false release, I like that.«
The text was first published in the VAN magazine on 14 September 2022.