Now You Know There Are Honest To God "Songs" in Classical Music. Here's Why You Should Desperately Care

Sadly, the number of people who might give a shit about this is vanishingly small, but it has to be written about anyway.

As a boy raised on Huey Lewis, Wham!, The Beatles, and Elvis, I remember the day when I learned that classical music actually had songs "just like us" and not just sonatas, operas, or worse. Roaming around HMV (which archaeologists can confirm was a record store in the latter 20th century), I remember my first hearing of Schwanengesang coming over the speakers and being completely transfixed.

While primacy may always be a factor in one's preferences for recordings, I've done much exploring in the genre and keep coming back to the fact that the recording I heard that day had not been surpassed in any interpretation I had heard since.

This is largely due to the fact that so few performers even bother with interpretation at all, particular on the "accompaniment" side. While for some, the great Schubert Song Cycles may simply be a showboating vehicle for the singer with a drag-along, paid-by-the hour mercenary at the Klavier, the Schiff/Schreier rendition that invited me into the genre so many decades ago was a much loved commitment to the music exposition that barely deserves to be lumped into the category of album churn that marked the end of the material music disc period at the end of the 20th century.

And most of the credit for lifting the interpretation out of simple recitation and into art falls on Andras Schiff, the Hungarian piano virtuoso whom one could hardly imagine taking a secondary position as mere "accompanist." While the admonition to never meet your heroes seems to be an unbreakable maxim (I met Schiff at a master class at Curtis and found him to be the most unbearable embodiment of Euro-Patrician condescension I'd ever encountered - and growing up in classical music, that was a high bar to cross!) it has to be imagined that his deep snobbery was what motivated his dedication to crafting the most fleshed out interpretation of Schubert's piano pairings on record.

And that they were. There are more examples than I can count in these recordings: The chosen, off-book "legato" overlay in Der Jaeger, when the song momentarily references the Maiden over the Ruffian, is the kind of thing no accompanist would bother with, much less dream up in the first place. At every moment of the recordings, Schiff is keenly aware of his role as co-narrator of the text, crafting each musical moment with the inflections and intentions with which they are composed in order to perfectly illustrate the texture underlying the text in perfect musical-literary counterpoint.

There are slurs, crescendos, accents, ritenutos, and more that are not in the original score. And of course there is genuine phrasing throughout that most boom-chuk, mail-in accompanists are not paid nearly enough to trouble with.

Through Schiff's rendering, one hears the full layering of texture that Schubert's endless creativity was able to draw out of what is essentially a percussion instrument. The compositions are astonishing in their ever-present complement to the text, but you would never hear that in a traditional performance. Schiff makes passionate declamations when needed, hidden pianississimos when needed, and is not afraid to bang and bash to punctuate the occasional outburst, so delicate is his touch that no one could ever accuse him of being a brute.

And then there is the eponymously named tenor, Peter Schreier. Schreier has a voice which could gingerly be described as "un-schoen." But for these purposes, that couldn't matter less. Like Schiff, he is not afraid to let rip into the desperate cris de coeur that are integral to the storyline of the sad protagonists he embodies. And yet as much as his voice will allow, he embraces the full, quiet tenderness of genuine, unrequited longing that are equally the inner pleas of the young romantic yearners of the song cycles.

Most joyous, despite the occasional intonation issues is Schreier's judicious vibratolessness. Even at a time before the early music people taught us what good music could actually sound like, Schreier declaims simply, transparently, and in the manner of the greatest - yet rarest - of artists who use their instruments as vessels for the art rather than the other way around.

There are far more beautiful voices throughout the singing world, and particularly the great German tenors like Fritz Wunderlich and Franz Voelker were famous for voices so lush you could bathe in them and then put them on as moisturizer afterwards. They were velvet draped in silk, whereas Schreier was, frankly, more sandpaper wrapped in cardstock.

But perhaps since he didn't have the crutch of beauty to rest his laurels upon, he rededicated himself trebly to the labor of interpretation, the crux of the art that so many vocal beauties can easily duck with their pure, dazzling sonics - the way pretty boys may utterly forego the development of character given the ease of their outward charms.

Schreier, as I'm sure has been said a million times, lives up to his name (Schreier literally means "screamer" auf Deutsch), but his expression throughout is sincere and flawless in the very best German tradition. It is often said that while Italian is beautiful in its vowels, German can be beautiful in its consonants. I think Schreier embodies that truth, both in his "zaertlich" pleadings and his ear-splitting outcries, better than almost any other singer. He is in many ways the Bjork of German Lieder.

The texts of these magnificent song cycles are wrenching. The range of romantic feeling is specific but universal. And the songs are crafted with such care that every morsel of feeling has both word and melody to transform the linear text into transportive emotion, the way certain chemicals will breach the blood-brain barrier and enter our consciousness more directly than more remote substances ever could. Through them, Schubert helps us mainline the passions of suffering and lovelorn youth, and the Schreier/Schiff pair is the premier pusher, needle, and plunger all in one.

Do your own experiments and try to find a more carefully prepared rendering. And if you find one, please send it my way. Back at HMV, each cycle was its own disc at $20 a pop, but now the three great cycles stream gratis on Spotify. Download a translation, and you will have endless hours to unpack the beauty and specificity of these art works. (You might even be able to suspend your Netflix for the month while you transport to another time to experience the same stalker themes of "You" without the gory pandering.)

So perfectly crafted and cared for are these recordings, that I have to say if you are an "accompanist" and have performed these works in the approved, good-enough conservatory style, you have essentially robbed your audience of 60% of the music you promised them. They wouldn't know what they were missing, like 90% of earnest but misguided classical music fans, but if they did (like the 90% who don't understand our banking system), they would openly revolt at the theft and artistic depravation you subjected them to.

Like I said, I have no idea who would give even half a shit about this stuff. But re-listening to these recordings today, I was reminded of just how marvelous - and just how rare - this kind of artistic dedication is to these classics to which we owe our entire musical inheritance.