Day 2 of the Schubertiade was a day of piano and lieder. Pianist William Youn had planned a concert of Schubert piano sonatas, in keeping with earlier Schubertiade programmes. Instead, one piano sonata was omitted, and he played the Three Intermezzos, Op. 117, by Johannes Brahms and Maurice Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan. Schubert’s Sonatas in E minor, D. 566, and in G major, D. 894, completed the program. The two encores from Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words were performed to the happiness of the audience.
Pianist William Youn playing at Schubertiade Hohenems 2025 Day 2
The evening programme was one that many had looked forward to. Tenor Julian Prégardien took on the entire Winterreise, D. 911, with Daniel Heide at the piano. Both experienced Schubertians, they took the song as we know it and transformed it into an evening of loss and madness. Our unnamed lover has been sent off by his beloved’s mother and spends the next 24 songs wandering around her village, remembering the things that they did together, visiting the places that they went, and metaphorically trying to change the bitter reality he’s now facing, alone in a cold winter village with all doors closed to him. We’re never certain of some of the things he does – are they reality or just his wild imagination?
Prégardien’s ability to read the song text as a secret lover’s language transforms the work into something more than just Müller’s text and Schubert’s music. We can hear the secret anguish as he punishes himself by visiting all the old places. He freezes in the winter wind and melts the snow with his tears. He dreams of dying, his body found in the spring in the snow. In the penultimate poem, he shakes all his morbidity off, decides to become cheerful and move on to another place and, in the end, finds the barefoot hurdy-gurdy player on the edge of town, and asks if he can accompany the musician and if the hurdy-gurdy man will accompany his songs.
It’s a non-definitive ending – is our lover entrusting his life and livelihood to a poor musician who cannot even support himself, or is he telling us that it’s necessary to break away from the normal to create a new life?
Julian Prégardien and Daniel Heide performing at Schubertiade Hohenems 2025 Day 2
Prégardien would not have succeeded as well without the able support of his accompanist, Daniel Heide. This was Julian Prégardien’s first Winterreise at the Schubertiade, but Daniel Heide’s fifth, with another upcoming in May 2026. In a conversation with them, Heide spoke of the necessity of reacting to the singers’ actions. He always had to be ready to pick up their mood, to adjust time and dynamics to fit their unspoken direction. He has to anticipate what they will want to do next, sometimes even leaving what he called a ‘magic silence’, unsullied by sound.
For the audience, it was like hearing a beloved piece in a new guise – with deeper emotions and a more intense interpretation of a familiar text. The silence as Prégardien finished told all that and more.
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