Jarrett Porter on the enduring power of Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’

On March 7, Berkshire Opera Festival will bring “Winterreise” to Studio E at Tanglewood’s Linde Center for Music and Learning, with baritone Jarrett Porter and BOF Artistic Director and pianist Brian Garman performing Franz Schubert’s haunting 24-song setting of poems by Wilhelm Müller.

A rejected lover. A frozen landscape. A mind unraveling in real time. Nearly 200 years after its premiere, “Winterreise” remains unnervingly current in its psychological portrait of isolation, heartbreak and existential drift.

Porter, praised by Opera News for his “imposing baritone” and “manifest honesty,” has built his career on major European opera stages, including Oper Frankfurt. But recital work, he says, is closest to his heart.

“I love to recital. If I were to pick my career, I would be doing some opera and mostly recital,” he said. “I think there can be difficulty with grabbing an audience in a recital, but this is one of the greatest pieces to do so because it is so psychological, so powerful, so universally moving.”

Unlike opera, there are no sets in a recital, no costumes or lighting cues to lean on. “The singer with no sets or costumes is left to create a kind of one-man show,” Porter said. His solution is internal. “The way that I process learning something like this and having the responsibility to hold an audience without set or costumes or lights or props is to stage it in my mind. Each song has an identity.”

Schubert’s writing, Porter insists, needs no adornment. “Schubert does an amazing job at setting the scene, and for me, you don’t need anything else. I feel like anything added to it would be almost subtracting. I’d rather just see the singer and the pianist the way that Schubert intended it to be.”

At the center of “Winterreise” is the wanderer, an unnamed figure moving through snow and memory after a failed love affair. For Porter, the character is both specific and universal. “There’s so much ambiguity in the piece,” he said. “We don’t know all of the answers in the first song. We don’t really know who this person is. There are tidbits of information dropped throughout each song. And I think the tendency is to put a narrative on that and to try to connect the dots rather than embracing what it is. The ambiguity is actually where the beauty is.”

That ambiguity extends to the cycle’s ending and the encounter with the eerie hurdy-gurdy player in “Der Leiermann.” Does the protagonist die? “I think one could make that argument,” Porter said. But he resists a neat conclusion. “Death is right in front of him. Death is actually the most peaceful answer to his problem and it’s not given to him. There’s something more, a deeper level.”

Rather than a literal death scene, Porter sees a reckoning. “For me, he’s not granted the easy way out. He has to sort of come to terms with being nothing and having no real skill as a songster or a poet or a wanderer.” The winter landscape, he suggests, mirrors the psyche: “The winter is sort of the mirror of his heart.”

In shaping the emotional arc across all 24 songs, Porter leans into uncertainty rather than resolution. “What I relate to in this piece is that in life, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you don’t know the next day. Even in tragedy—especially in tragedy—there’s so much question.”

Porter performed Gounod’s “Faust” at BOF in 2024 with Garman conducting but this will be the first time the two will be collaborating with Garman at his instrument. “I love making music with Brian,” said Porter. “I’m a huge fan of his musicianship. I think we’re sort of bitten by the same bug that Schubert is, and so I was super honored that he asked me to do this with him.”

For tickets, visit berkshireoperafestival.org