The Winterreise cycle is the most frequently recorded in the repertoire. But why is that?
It’s a fascinating work, not least because of the circumstances surrounding its creation and its late — and seemingly fateful — place in Schubert’s life: he survived it by only one year. It seems to tell an entire story, albeit mysteriously and in fragments. I believe that every recitalist eventually feels the urge to perform these twenty-four lieder. The cycle is programmed very regularly in concert halls around the world and is often a must-see event for audiences.
From a vocal standpoint, it adapts easily to different voice types: it has been sung and recorded by tenors as well as baritones and basses, and sometimes even by mezzo-sopranos and sopranos. It has, in a way, become a milestone in the careers of many performers, who sometimes record it on multiple occasions throughout their lives. There’s no end to this cycle; as the years go by and we grow older and gain more life experience, we want to delve deeper and deeper into it.

How would you describe the emotional and musical depth of the cycle?
It is a cycle of extraordinary poetic and musical unity. Although Schubert composed the two halves just a few months apart, the work as a whole exhibits a rare degree of coherence. From beginning to end, both the performer and the listener are immersed and captivated as they follow in the footsteps of this wandering traveller, who is like them… Singing and listening to Winterreise is an experience that transcends the boundaries of sound and image. The title doesn’t lie—it is a true ‘journey,’ and despite the landscapes traversed, it is first and foremost an inner journey.
I am also struck by how deeply the cycle has taken root in settings beyond the concert hall. For example, the arrangement of Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree) appears in numerous collections of children’s songs and has long been part of German popular culture. Paradoxically, this melody, steeped in melancholy, has become a symbol of serenity and innocence.

Schubert described Winterreise as a cycle of frightening songs. How do you perceive this description today?
It’s true that the cycle is deeply moving in many ways. It all begins with a lost love and a breakup. The wanderings of the journey then unfold against a backdrop of cold, snow, and ice, in almost complete solitude, at times teetering on the brink of madness and the edge of death. It’s not exactly reassuring.
In my artistic work, however, I find a certain sense of peace in returning to the score day after day to grasp its full complexity, to embody each vocal line in my voice, and to refine—again and again—a tone I seek to perfect. One can only work on Winterreise over the long term, far from any sense of urgency and removed from the hustle and bustle of the world.

When did you discover the cycle, when did you decide to sing it, and how did you prepare for it?
It was one of the first vocal music CDs I ever bought, back when I was still just starting out as a singer: it was a recording of Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Jörg Demus, which I still have in my record collection. It was a real aesthetic revelation! I listened to it a great deal, both for Schubert’s music and for this performer’s artistry.
I began tackling the cycle very early in my vocal career, sporadically, starting with the lieder that seemed most accessible to me. Later, during my studies at the Conservatoire supérieur, I went through a phase where I stubbornly brought these lieder, one after another, to my teachers, to the point of testing the limits of their patience. But it wasn’t until later that I sang the entire cycle, during an informal musical weekend in the countryside. On Sunday morning, I was working on the first song, Gute Nacht, when Michel Tranchant—a pianist and conductor—walked into the room. He sat down at the piano, and we spontaneously played the entire cycle from start to finish, without really having planned it. And it was alongside him that I sang Winterreise for the first time in concert.

How did you manage to master the German language so well?
The lied plays an important role in my relationship with this language. I took German classes in middle school and high school, but it wasn’t until I started singing that I really immersed myself in it. It seemed essential to me in order to find that crucial balance between text and music in the interpretation of the lied.
Naturally, you first need to achieve good pronunciation, and to do that, you have to learn to produce sounds—phonemes—that aren’t necessarily present in my native language, French. But the nuances of the language must also be faithfully conveyed through singing: the stress patterns, the length of the vowels, the rhythm of the poem…
Above all, I was extremely fortunate to work for years with a great lied interpreter who has since passed away, Udo Reinemann, a German baritone who had made France his second homeland. Under his guidance, I studied hundreds of lieder: it is thanks to him that I truly understood how to convey the musicality of the language through song.
Later, I lived for several years in Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller, which is, in a way, one of Germany’s cultural capitals. That time there allowed me to perfect my German but, above all, to immerse myself in the country’s literary and artistic culture.

Do you draw inspiration from personal experiences? Do you associate specific experiences with certain melodies? Is it perhaps necessary to have lived through certain things in order to perform Winterreise?
I don’t think it’s at all necessary to draw on specific memories or particular experiences to sing Winterreise. I believe one must try to approach it with all one’s humanity, with all one’s sincerity. A performance is shaped by everything we’ve experienced, every book we’ve read, and every story we’ve discovered. The important thing is to step onto the stage with an open mind and let that experience and imagination speak for themselves.
On the other hand, being able to hear the sound of the wind in the branches of a linden tree or the ice cracking beneath one’s feet while crossing a river, experiencing silence, the biting cold in a snowy landscape—all of this seems to me to have the power, secretly and enduringly, to enrich our imagination, and thus our interpretation.

What are the challenges involved in performing Winterreise?
It is a long and demanding cycle, both musically and vocally—a sort of marathon. The sequence of pieces requires a great deal of technical mastery to avoid vocal fatigue after more than an hour of singing. Memorizing such a long text can also be a challenge for some singers.
But above all, the cycle requires a very wide range of colors and nuances. One must be able to express not only (which seems self-evident in this context) suffering, despair, and even, here and there, irony (a broken heart is capable of that…), but also all the tenderness of a happy memory.
Singing Winterreise also means becoming part of a tradition. Over the decades, certain interpretive conventions have taken root among both audiences and performers—conventions that certainly serve as inspiration, but from which one must sometimes learn to maintain the right distance. From this perspective, singing it with Billy Eidi—a wonderful pianist who has done so much to champion the song—brings a new perspective. Thanks to him, the work itself takes on a different musical meaning for me, a different character. It was through our work as a duo that I finally found my own personal interpretation of this cycle.

Do you have a favorite melody in this cycle?
It would be very difficult to choose just one from among so many extraordinary pieces. I think, however, that I have a special affinity for the end of the cycle, whose strangeness has always fascinated me. I can’t help but be overcome with emotion when singing Das Wirtshaus (The Inn) and, of course, Der Leiermann (The Lyre Player), which closes the cycle and leaves the listener in a state of suspended anticipation.

Why do you think Schubert’s friends hated Winterreise when he first presented it to them?
Joseph von Spaun, a close friend of Schubert’s, reports that the cycle made a very strong impression on them during the first performance, in which the composer sang the cycle from start to finish. His friends were struck by the work’s sad and somber character, in which happiness appears only fleetingly in the form of memories. However, Schubert had also predicted that they would come to appreciate the cycle as much as he himself loved it. History does not say whether he ultimately convinced them.

Will we hear you perform another Schubert cycle?
I’ll only answer that in the presence of my pianist! Joking aside, it seems to me that choosing a new program is often a joint effort. Of course, after Winterreise, people often think of Schwanengesang, which brings together Schubert’s final lieder, composed notably to poems by Heinrich Heine. Billy Eidi and I have already performed Johannes Brahms’s La Belle Maguelonne in concert, and I believe our adventures with the great lieder cycles will continue.

Zügig und in ebenbürtiger Partnerschaft aufgeführte Winterreise