How do you stage Schubert up a mountain?
Director John Bridcut describes filming the epic song cycle ‘Winterreise’ in -14°C in the Swiss Alps
We seized the moment of a snowstorm to venture ouside and ask Appl to sing. Most singers would have refused point blank
Eight centimetres of snow would be ideal, I thought – but instead we had 80
‘It’s a Tardis!” was my immediate reaction when I first saw an arresting image of the Julier Tower in the Swiss Alps. This was not the famous blue police call-box, but a huge 10-sided sentinel, glowing red – an equally incongruous intruder in an ancient alpine landscape. It seemed to defy the normal rules of time and space. So, when the baritone Benjamin Appl suggested this extraordinary theatre as the perfect venue to film Winterreise (Franz Schubert’s introspective song cycle about a young man wandering on a winter journey through the snow, failing to forget his lost love), his idea immediately clicked.
The Tower would be a place of refuge, but also of entrapment – and a totem of the timelessness of Schubert’s music. The singer could wander distractedly in the wintry wilderness surrounding it. We now had a rare chance to do for music what television should: take it away from the stage or concert hall and reinterpret it for the screen in three dimensions – four, if you include time.
It was decades ago that cinema redefined drama for the screen, but even today television seldom finds a new visual language for classical music. The few examples include Holocaust, James Kent’s 2005 film of music from Auschwitz; Dominic Best’s recent film of The Turn of the Screw using all the space in an empty Wilton’s Music Hall; and Young Men, the Ballet Boyz production about the First World War created for the stage, but danced for the screen in deep French mud.
We were under pressure from the start. Gone are the days when the BBC would fully fund an ambitious music project of this sort, even on a straitened budget. Its worryingly modest initial contribution did encourage others to join in – Swiss TV and the arts streaming site Marquee, as well as two musical philanthropists, Simon Robey and Vernon Ellis. But the project survived only because so many of the participants believed in it so strongly. There was no time to waste, because the five-storey Julier Tower, erected in 2017, has to dematerialise under planning rules by 2023. Winter 2020 was ruled out by lockdowns, and a year later Covid was still a substantial risk, but any delay would mean losing our Tardis.
During reconnaissance in July, we realised the building was uncomfortably resonant. So, to dampen the acoustics, we commissioned a nine-metre-diameter carpet to cover the circular stage, and a massive black drape (10 metres square) to hang overhead. I asked Appl whether singing at an altitude of 2,300 metres would affect either his voice or his breathing. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of stamina”. He needed plenty of courage too, to cope with the weather.
We chose to beat the early skiers by filming in early November, a dead month in the Swiss mountains, with most facilities closed. We had persuaded the wonderful family-run Hotel Solaria in the village of Bivio to take us in for a week – 15 minutes away in the valley, but the nearest source of hot food to keep us going. But would there be snow? The visionary who built the Tower, Giovanni Netzer, was (fairly) confident there would be, but as October ended Switzerland was still sunny, warm and dry. It was only on the day we arrived that the temperature dropped.
By then the new carpet was in place, imported from Belgium, and also the brand-new Bösendorfer 280VC grand piano, magnificent in its oak case – the prize delight of Urs Bachmann, piano mastermind at the Verbier Festival. While the drape was hoisted above it, my cameraman, Jonathan Partridge, and I went to recce some outdoor locations. The lake behind the tower was lightly frozen – perhaps a place for the Wanderer to carve his beloved’s name on the ice in Auf dem Flusse. A nearby stone tower could be the charcoal-burner’s hut in Rast. But the snow had begun to fall, so thickly that Appl and our pianist James Baillieu broke down on their way from the airport, and had to wait for two hours in a lay-by before being rescued. Eight centimetres of snow would be ideal, I thought, but instead we had 80, and, while snowploughs intermittently kept the road up to the pass open, most of our off-road locations became impractical.
We pressed ahead with filming inside the Tower, but once we had enough material for playback, we seized the moment of a snowstorm to venture outside and ask Appl to sing. Now, most singers would refuse point blank to be filmed in such conditions, let alone sing. Appl probably wished he had done the same. The temperature was minus 14 degrees, and the contours of the landscape were disappearing fast. The Julier Tower in the background vanished completely after 10 minutes. It was a scene from Scott of the Antarctic, with the film crew huddled under a fishing umbrella, and our sound recordist, Paddy Boland, buried inside a tarpaulin. For a moment, Appl ruled out any singing, but then decided to give it a go, and gamely tackled not just the agreed first two lines of Mut! but the whole song – his voice surprisingly strong, and his synchronisation with the piano playback faultless. In the white-out, the only sign of snowfall was the white streaks crossing his black overcoat horizontally, and the snow matting his hair – just right for Der greise Kopf, when the Wanderer relishes his frosted hair turning him into an old man.
Then we retreated again to the Tardis, but there was no time-travelling for us: we had 24 songs to record in just four days, with different camera set-ups for each, as well as further expeditions in the snow. The stop-start process of filming was arduous for the artists, as was their physical separation within the Tower. At one point, Baillieu turned to me to say: “I must be able to see Ben breathing!” Yet their intuitive, telepathic engagement, born of a long partnership in this music, meant they always breathed together: their ability to sustain the intensity of Schubert’s masterpiece, with glints of light in the darkness, was astounding.
By now, we had come to realise that Franz Schubert had struck a neo-Faustian bargain with us. We had miraculously escaped Covid, but each of us had to experience for ourselves the anguish of the sometimes delirious Wanderer that he describes so eloquently. In return, he allowed us to re-imagine his wonderful music – perhaps the greatest song cycle ever written – in a distinctive way that I hope would make him smile.
‘Winter Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise’ is on BBC Four tonight at 8pm