Snapshots in Time

On Schubert, Goethe, and the recordings we leave behind

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Back in 2009, while I was preparing for the first sessions of what would become my debut album, Winter Words, I was quite daunted by the idea of my first album. My partner at the time was a retired countertenor who had made a number of successful albums during his performing years and had since moved on to a successful career in arts administration. The night before our session, anxiously tossing and turning and unable to sleep, I confessed my nervousness at the pressure I felt to be perfect for the recording, hoping it would be a definitive document to add to the already rich library of legendary recordings of those songs. The advice he gave me that evening is wisdom I now think of every single time I find myself perched in front of a microphone: recordings are simply snapshots in time. Just like old photos we see of ourselves on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media platform we use for such things, depending on the day and how much nostalgia we feel, we will either marvel at those pictures or cringe at them. While our reactions to them may vary over time, the snapshots are unchanging, simply images of us frozen in one second of millions of seconds of a lifetime of personal evolution.

With the forthcoming release of Lamenting Earth this Friday, I’ve found myself thinking about that advice while sifting through last year’s session footage as part of our promotional efforts for the album.

Due to the complexity of everyone’s calendars, we were limited to recording all of the music for Lamenting Earth in just two days last year — a tall order for an album so densely packed with challenging music. On our first day, we tried to lay down as much of the most challenging music as we could, in order to afford ourselves flexibility in case it ended up requiring more time than we had budgeted for those pieces. As we wrapped the day, still feeling like we had some gas left after the Jasper Quartet departed, Myra and I decided to record a couple of our Schubert songs for the album, ending the long day with Schubert’s two-minute masterful setting of Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied.

I asked us to include Schubert’s song on the album to illustrate a beginning point of innocence in the album’s journey through humanity’s continually evolving relationship with nature. In the song, the speaker sees the peace in epic nature around him, looking to it as a promise of a future moment of profound rest. Schubert’s setting is masterful in its simplicity, and from a programmatic standpoint, it felt like a pure place to begin the trajectory of our album, which goes on from there to chart a path from then until our current fraught moment in which we are grappling with a climate that seems to be changing too rapidly to fully understand.

Goethe’s poem is similarly adept in its simplicity, allowing the reader to project many layers of meaning onto it. The story goes that Goethe inscribed his Wanderer’s nocturne on the wall of a cabin in the woods in which he spent the night while traveling as a young man in 1780. The lines could be read as a simple sketch of a weary traveler longing for the comfortable bed awaiting him at his journey’s end — and yet many have found far more in them, as the poem has passed through the filters of countless readers’ life experiences. Schubert’s profound setting is but one example of the multitudes of meaning they can inspire.

Last year, as we recorded takes of Schubert’s song, I was keenly aware that we were approaching the first anniversary of my mother’s passing, and had just passed the six-month anniversary of my father’s death. Singing the song, I was flooded with memories of the two-plus years of suffering my mother endured following her stroke, trapped in a body that would no longer do her bidding, that would not allow her to eat or to speak. I thought of my father, navigating his own journey with cancer, all while bearing anguished witness to my mother’s ordeal, desperately trying to care for her and bring her any modicum of joy possible.

Editing the session footage in preparation for this week’s release, I’ve been starkly reminded of what I was feeling as we recorded the song at the end of an exhausting, but rewarding day in the studio. I remember feeling the song as a prayer for peace for my parents, wishing them rest and joy in whatever place awaits us after this life. Our takes of the song were an intense few moments, but ones that felt like important and pivotal ones on my journey through grief following their passing.

I normally wouldn’t share such personal connections to the repertoire. I really do feel that those things are for the artist, and like Goethe’s simple lines of poetry, keeping those interpretive threads private allows the listeners to project their own lives onto the performance and draw their own conclusions from it. But I feel compelled in this instance for some reason, perhaps to take another opportunity to honor my parents, who both gave me and my brother so much. Perhaps it is also because I know that a recording is a snapshot in time, while I will likely carry some shade of that interpretation and life experience with me whenever I perform the song from here on out, it will always be different, as it’s impossible to recreate those moments and the magic of live performance is that we are always creating something new, something inescapably of the present.

The story goes that Goethe ended up revisiting that cabin 50 years after inscribing those lines of poetry into the wall and came across his carvings shortly before he died. Recognizing his handiwork, he reportedly wept. Certainly, it is because even though those etchings in the wall were vestiges of a moment frozen in time, he had a deeper and different understanding of those words having lived a half-century of life since composing them.