A Passionate, Yet Light Voice For Icy Songs By Schubert

It’s hard to think of a song cycle as gripping as “Winterreise,” Schubert’s setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller that trace the downward spiral — physical, spiritual and psychological — of a rejected lover who leaves his town in the dark of night and wanders through the snow toward a hoped-for death. Müller’s poetry is presented from a man’s perspective, and Schubert’s cycle is mostly sung by men, although women (generally mezzo-sopranos) have taken it up over the years.

Christine Schäfer singing “Winterreise” at the Rose Theater.

If any soprano seems likely to make the sex change seem incidental it is Christine Schäfer, who in past recitals has proved adept at using her supple tone to get to the emotional core of a text, rendering its surface meaning almost secondary. Ms. Schäfer sang the cycle on Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theater, and if it took a few moments to reconcile this dark music with her light, flexible voice, by the end of “Gute Nacht,” the first song, you were convinced that hers would be a plausible approach.

One thing she did was take a cue from the overt pictorialism of Schubert’s piano line. In the opening of “Die Wetterfahne,” which describe the wind moving the weather vane on the house of the protagonist’s lost beloved, Ms. Schäfer connected the notes with faint descending slides that suggested both the imagery of the text and the despondency within it.

She used a similar technique to give shape to the verse of “Wasserflut” that momentarily evokes the spring thaw. And in “Auf dem Flusse,” which likens the rejected lover’s heart to a frozen stream, Ms. Schäfer produced a gentle, nuanced sound that seemed scarcely more than a whisper until the final verse, when she gradually increased her power to suggest the passion hidden under the ice.

But Ms. Schäfer’s reading was not about moving from effect to effect. It had an overall form that mirrored the journey that Müller’s poetry and Schubert’s music describe. You could feel the wanderer’s energy fading from song to song as Ms. Schäfer’s voice became quieter, lighter and more velvety.

Baritones often make this progression overtly dramatic, a chilling tug of war between resignation and defiance. Ms. Schäfer made the journey one of transcendence: as the body fades, the spirit is increasingly liberated. The fading was a matter of ever finer gradations of pianissimo from song to song; the transcendence was in the richness of Ms. Schäfer’s timbre as it receded.

In “Das Wirtshaus,” a song about a graveyard, likened to an inn, Ms. Schäfer projected a sense of being almost frozen, and except for a moment’s rallying in “Mut!” (“Courage!”), she continued inexorably toward the sublime stasis of “Der Leiermann,” the description of a hobbled, death-haunted organ grinder that closes the cycle.

Eric Schneider, Ms. Schäfer’s regular pianist, matched the contours of her performance perfectly, but also made the most of the descriptive music that makes Schubert’s accompaniments rich enough to stand on their own.

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