By Hugh Robertson

Maybe it’s due to his status as one of the greatest-ever singers of lied, or art song. But when I think of the great German baritone Matthias Goerne I imagine him in a large coat, collar turned against the wind, trudging through a desolate wintry landscape. A quintessentially Romantic figure, a Caspar David Friedrich painting come to life, or indeed the protagonist of Schubert’s Winterreise.

So it seems incongruous in the extreme that, when we spoke on the phone last week, Goerne was sitting in the back of a camper van in Traralgon.

Goerne is in Australia for a few weeks, performing Schubert’s three great song cycles – Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang – around the country, including two recitals in Sydney this week. But rather than flying in and flying out, he is exploring Australia. He and his family are driving a campervan from Adelaide to Melbourne then onto Sydney — and his recital partner, pianist Daniil Trifonov, one of the classical world’s biggest stars, has come along for the ride too.

‘We started in Adelaide, and then we went to two different places between Adelaide and Melbourne, and then from Melbourne we have three or four stops going to Sydney,’ says Goerne, the smile on his face evident even over a patchy phone call from regional Victoria.

‘It’s absolutely paradise, the kind of freedom to have and to do this with friends and family. It’s a good kind of mix between work and normal life.

‘So often [musicians] travel to all the centres in the world, but at the end of their life, they have seen almost nothing: just concert halls, pianos, hotels. You are missing so many important things. So I suggested [this idea] to Daniil Trifonov, and he was immediately thrilled and he wanted to do this. So we are six, and we both have a child with us. We cook and we talk and we have fun. It’s perfect.’

Australia’s sunburnt country seems a world away – geographically and figuratively – from the intrinsically European landscape of Schubert’s songs. Written in the 1820s in Vienna, Winterreise in particular draws on deeply Romantic images of the individual warring against Fate, journeying through a dark and desolate physical and emotional landscape amidst heartbreak, misery and fatalism.

But as Goerne points out, although the flora and fauna might be different, Schubert’s themes are universal.

‘Winterreise… is representing all our lives. It's about us. And that's why you can do it in the middle of the Amazon, you can do it in Hawaii, you can do it here, you can do it in China, you can go to Russia or to Kazakhstan or wherever. When the people are willing to come to the concert, then they are touched in the end.

‘This is what is so fascinating about this literature: it's not from yesterday, and around the corner. No, it's quite old already. But it feels so modern and it contains something so existential.

‘I have done Winterreise more than 200 times in my life,’ he says matter-of-factly, ‘But it is so fascinating to do it again and again. It’s like meeting people again and again – people have so many facets, so many different kinds of layers. And, like with Winterreise, there is always something new to discover.’

One person who Goerne is getting to know better on this trip is his recital partner Daniil Trifonov. Although they have performed together several times, and recorded an album together for Deutsche Grammophon, they have never spent this much time together – and as anyone who has travelled in a group for an extended period, even the closest friendships can be tested by so much time in close proximity.

Not so for this pair, though, and it is clear from talking to Goerne that he is full of admiration for Trifonov both as an artist and a person.

‘It is very interesting,’ says Goerne, somewhat quizzically. ‘Especially when I work with him, I cannot feel any kind of age difference – but in fact he is younger than my son [Trifonov is 32, Goerne turns 58 this week]. There is more than a generation between us, but it feels absolutely normal.

As normal as can be when you are talking about one of the brightest stars in the classical music universe, at any rate.

‘He is, in a way the most extremely talented and gifted person that I have met in my life,’ says Goerne of Trifonov.

‘The capacity he has, the instinct, the musicality inside – it's from a dimension where I cannot, even when I look to the horizon of it, I cannot see the end.

‘In general, the level – with someone like Daniil Trifonov – is immediately so high. You can go to any kind of place with an artist like this.’

Unimpeachable though Trifonov’s talents are, the Sydney performances will be his first-ever performance of Winterreise. It’s a reversal of roles for Goerne who, more than twenty years ago, was the next big thing performing Schubert alongside one of the true titans of 20th century piano music, Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel. Goerne doesn’t think of himself as a teacher to Trifonov in the same way that Brendel was for him, but he says he always keeps in mind Brendel’s cardinal rule for performing Schubert. ‘The most important thing is that you think about the last piece before you start the first one, so that you are clear in yourself what you want to talk about.’

Goerne may be too humble to think of himself as the wise older teacher imparting a lifetime of knowledge on his young pupil, there is no doubt that it is a lifetime of knowledge. Goerne said in a recent interview that, without his parents having introduced him to Schubert as a child, he would never have become a singer. That it was Schubert, and the way he combines music and text, that made music so appealing to the young Matthias. All these years later, and Schubert’s songs still hold all the magic and fascination that they did back then.

Of course it is one of the great ‘what ifs?’ – what if Schubert had not died at just 31? How much more music could he have written? How might he have altered and advanced the course of musical history? As Goerne points out, the fourteen songs grouped together as Schwanengesang (which translated to ‘swan song’), written in the final months of Schubert’s life, hint at a composer whose inventiveness and genius was only just beginning to reveal itself.

‘Schwanengesang is on a higher step of composing even compared to Winterreise, which is not a long time before. When you think about [songs like] Ihr Bild or Der Doppelgänger or Die Stadt, this is completely new – even after he had already composed 800 songs. Suddenly there is almost no concrete melody anymore, just repetition and then this kind of impressionistic piano part. It’s completely new.

He went on a much higher level as a composer, as an artist. It feels so promising, if we would have left more kind of material like this, or if his life was not suddenly finished, he would have gone on and on and on, with no limits.

Sadly Schubert’s own journey was ended far too soon. But one gets the sense that, for Goerne and Trifonov, this Australian tour is only the beginning.