There are artists who claim that they must be obsessed by this Schubert poetic song cycle to be able to sing it. And perhaps the Liceu also wants the public to become obsessed in order to appreciate it. In its fourth consecutive season inviting visual artists to reinterpret it, the Gran Teatre recorded a 72% full house this Friday night in its large hall, which for a lied cycle is saying a lot.
The great musical attraction was provided by Helmut Deutsch on the piano and a veteran opera baritone, Michael Volle, who has offered a particularly dramatic and less intimate version, in keeping with a Gran Teatre. They, truly brilliant, received effusive applause from the audience for five minutes, but it was when Joan Fontcuberta came out to greet them that the lyrical coliseum broke out into an ovation.
The images of the Barcelona photographer and artist (1955) ran like an organic backdrop in constant change, evoking in an abstract and poetic way the different songs: the vital landscape in Sueño de Primavera, the overwhelming thaw on the lake in Lágrimas gallinas, the villa in the distance in El pueblo…
Fontcuberta insists that his art is that of non-intervention. It is enough for the artist to recognize as something special and emotional what he finds in those historical archives of God, photographs or negatives devoured by humidity and fungi… the evanescent, inapprehensible memory.
Hence, it was not difficult for him to fit into Winter Journey a painful event that has affected people who are very close to him: Alzheimer’s. Converting the psychological journey of the young walker sadly disillusioned with love into that of an older man anguished by the loss of reason and memory has been a bet that people have valued.
The staging of Macbeth signed by Jaume Plensa on stage is fondly remembered. But, if we are talking about domestic visual artists, Fontcuberta is right to intervene in the dramaturgy of Schubert’s cycle to place us in that dramatic world in which darkness, desolation, loneliness, resignation have to do with the degradation of memory. of one’s own identity.
Hasselblad Award 2013, the artist and essayist, who makes use of photography to delve into a critical vision between its truth or its fiction, did not want to go beyond his limits by assuming stage direction. It is Anna Ponces who, with a wheelchair, a floor lamp and a nursing home bed – which seemed too hospitable – recreates in the abstract those four walls in which the walker sees himself enclosed in this special Winterreise. Volle begins by sitting while his wife and his caregiver show him slides of his youth in the Alps or on the seashore (how funny is Volle’s own face when he was young). Afterwards, that patient is omniscient.
The unique function has attracted international attention. The BBC Word Service was looking for audiences who expressed themselves in English to capture their opinion on what they had seen, and it had no trouble finding expatriates and tourists. A retired Portuguese woman who knows the city – and how crowded it is with tourism – came to the Liceu for the first time, attracted by the musicians, but knowing well about Fontcuberta.
And three entire rows of the stalls had been taken over by teenagers from a secondary school in Vilafranca del Penedès… “we saw that we had the opportunity to see that and here we are. We loved it!” This is what is called an unexpected creation of audiences.
It’s a shame that the cough has definitely returned to the theaters. On this occasion, at times besmirching the recitation of Susanna Rafart’s poems written for the occasion, with the exception of the first, which comes from her book D’una sola branca and which precisely made Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of that Liceu de les Arts, they saw a clear parallel with the Winter’s Journey. His texts were interspersed between songs, coming face to face with the poems of Wilhelm Müller that Schubert discovered in part in 1824 and set to music in 1827, already very ill with syphilis. The Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger would publish them on the last day of the year 1828, six weeks after the composer died.
At that time Müller was considered naive and sentimental. And Schubert’s music seemed just as naive to them when it bowed to the poet’s expression. Schubert culminated classicism, intensified it, and formulated what would be known as romanticism, with its archetypal themes… the walker who discovers the landscape, the stream, love/disappointment, anguish, disappointment and death. Even so, people could not abstract themselves from the depth of emotions even then. Now at the Liceu the effect has been back and forth: from romantic emotional frankness to Rafart’s intensity of thought and images. Both refuges against ventiunesque egotism.
