I recently underwent a course of speech therapy, consisting of various vocal exercises, because of some hoarseness that had crept into my speaking voice over the past year. In the course of doing the exercises I realized that I hadn’t done any singing in a long time.
Singing was one of my chief hobbies for many years, beginning in my thirties. In public it meant being in a chorus, at various times the University Chorus at UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Community Chorus. In private I sang classical lieder and opera arias while banging on the piano and Spanish-language songs of various kinds while plucking on the guitar.
But over the last five or ten years this activity somehow petered out of my life, leading to a certain atrophy of my vocal cords (helped along by aging). Hence the hoarseness and the need for speech therapy, prescribed by my ear-nose-throat specialist.
The treatment seems to have been effective, and once I felt vocally strong enough I looked at my music bookshelf and, almost unconsciously, homed in the Schirmer volume of Schubert songs for low voice, which I took out, put on the piano and opened to the page featuring Schubert’s Gute Nacht, the first song in the cycle Die Winterreise (set to poems by Wilhelm Müller).
For most of my life — since the age of ten, to be exact — I have felt that this is the most beautiful song ever composed.
in the winter of 1945–46 — the first winter after the war — my mother and I spent a few days in the resort town of Bad Harzburg, at the foot of the Harz Mountains in north central Germany (a place where later I lived and went to high school). Bad Harzburg does not have the aristocratic cachet of spas like Baden-Baden with its luxurious Kurhaus, including its famous casino (Kur, meaning ‘cure’, is often prefixed to various institutions in German spa resorts), but it appeals to the bourgeoisie of Northern Germany and is therefore also a middlebrow cultural center. (It is also where, in 1931, the Nazi party conspired with other right-wing groups to put an end to the Weimar Republic.) When I was there, a full-time chamber orchestra (strictly speaking a “salon orchestra” called Kurorchester) played afternoon concerts of light classical music almost daily in the Kurpark, and weekly evening concerts of standard classics in the Kursaal.
On occasion, some touring musicians gave concerts or recitals. During that winter stay, on a cold day, it happened to be the baritone Heinrich Schlusnus, performing Die Winterreise in the unheated Kursaal. At the time I was rather new to classical music,both as a listener and a piano student. The effect of that short piano introduction and then the magnificent intonation of Fremd bin ich eingezogen… was magical. I forgot the cold air around me and felt enveloped in the music. The memory of that sensation has never gone away.
Coby Lubliner's Blog 