Lived experience: Matthias Goerne & Tamara Stefanovich in Schubert’s Winterreise at Oxford International Song Festival

Tamara Stefanovich, Matthias Goerne at Salzburg Easter Festival in 2025 [Photo: SF/Marco Borrelli]

Schubert: Winterreise; Matthias Goerne, Tamara Stevanovich; Oxford International Song Festival at Olivier Hall, St Edward’s School 
Reviewed 10 October 2026

The further along the journey, the harder the going: Matthias Goerne makes Winterreise a remarkable piece of lived experience bringing a lifetime’s work to the role 

It is nearly 30 years since Matthias Goerne made his debut at the Salzburg Festival with Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in 1997, and nearly 25 years since his compelling account of the title role in Berg’s Wozzeck at Covent Garden (in 2002, the one with the glass tanks!). Much water (and Wagner) has gone under the bridge since then. 

So it was with great interest that a capacity audience gathered at the Olivier Hall at St Edward’s School in Oxford on Saturday 10 October 2026 for baritone Mattias Goerne and pianist Tamara Stefanovich‘s performance of Schubert’s Winterreise at the opening weekend of the Oxford International Song Festival. The event was also Goerne’s debut at the festival (amazingly!)

The concert was giving with subtitles which is a relatively new innovation at the festival. These help prevent the audience from spending the duration with their heads in copies, but in song like Schubert’s where text is repeated and the flow adjusted, you sometimes miss the wider textual context of a line. 

Goerne sang from memory and the entire concert was a remarkable physical embodiment, his expressive physical language becoming as important as his vocal.  From the first notes it was clear that Goerne’s expressive legato was limited but his vibrato gave the voice a remarkable fragility. This combined with his restless body language created the structure of his Winterreise. 

‘Gute Nacht’ was not too fast  but full of anxiety and melancholy. Then in ‘Die Wetterfahne’, Stefanovich’s uncompromising piano combined with Goerne’s dark tone to create a sense of vivid anger. As the cycle developed there was also the suggestion of delusion, were the poet’s experiences real or imagined? But whichever, for Goerne they were lived experience.

Dark and depressive, in ‘Erstarrung’ the voice became high tension. The poet seemed out of himself, right on the edge. For all Stefanovich’s transparent piano, ‘Der Lindenbaum’ was not the calm way-point it can be but a highlight of the poet’s increasing delusion. He seemed somewhere else entirely, so ‘Auf dem Flusse’ felt like a popula song sung to himself. Goerne’s tendency not to look at the audience heightened to feeling this man was disturbed. By ‘Irrlicht’ and ‘Rast’ things had become deep and dark, whilst ‘Frühlingstraum ‘ felt definitely in the poet’s head. 

There were moments of story telling, such as ‘Die Krähe ‘, but for much of the second half we were not so much on a journey as exploring a profoundly disturbed destination. ‘Im Dorfe’ had a remarkable physical enactment of the story from Goerne. By ‘Der Wegweiser’ the words ‘travel a road from which no man returned’ seemed to resonate profoundly with this poet’s experience. ‘Das Wirtshaus’ was remarkably slow and quiet, the result surprisingly magical, contrasting with the vigour of ‘Mut’. 

‘Die Nebensonnen’ showed Goerne’s poet at the end of his tether and Goerne really stretched out the end. Throughout the second half of the cycle I was aware of Goerne and Stevanovich using rubato to expressive purposes. Speeds were not slow, per se, but there was a lot of space, this was a remarkably long Winterreise. The further along the journey, the harder the going and by the time we reached Der Leierman never have I been so glad to have reached our destination. Except for this poet, Goerne seemed to suggest that this was no end and he was doomed to wander in his delusion.