WINTER STORM

It’s been a cold start to the new year here in the UK. While there have been reports of thick snow in Scotland and some northern and central areas, there’s none in my cosy corner of the South West of England. Instead, a thin white stubble frost covers the driveways, streets, and surrounding countryside — as brittle as my sense of humour at the moment, having caught a nasty virus.

With little appetite for food (Marmite on toast aside), let alone my main form of sustenance—culture—it has been a time for banality: radio call-ins on late-night radio shows, podcasts about films, and (less banal) the Beatles Anthology documentary on the Disney Channel, which has been a delight to revisit.

Today I managed to digest something a little more substantial: a documentary on YouTube about the great English conductor Reginald Goodall that a friend of mine sent me. I loved the awkward footage of the introverted musician, who gained a cult following from the 1950s to the 1980s among devotees of opera performed in Britain, thanks to his legendary performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia, as well as key masterpieces from the Wagner canon — especially Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal. In these works especially, he became a master comparable to Hans Knappertsbusch and Wilhelm Furtwängler, two German conductors he admired greatly.

Watching clips of Goodall conducting singers and sitting down for tea with colleagues in the back rooms of the Royal Opera and ENO, I felt inspired to play a scene from his recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (originally released on EMI): “Winterstürme”, Siegmund’s rapturous spring song from Die Walküre. In Goodall’s hands it unfolds with an almost devotional quality — the orchestra slowly settling into a new dimension of time and space, the lyricism of the scene allowed to bloom without haste — turning what is often treated as a moment of Teutonic ardour into something even more earthy and human.

Lying in my sick bed, listening to the recording, I was suddenly transported back to the first time I ever played this exact performance, around this same time of year a few decades ago, as I was expanding my knowledge of great opera recordings.

Playing Winterstürme back then, I noticed through a gap in the curtains a suffused orange light and somehow sensed snow was falling outside the window, like a sixth sense. Drawing back the curtains and opening the windows to confirm my suspicion, I could see flurries of soft, powdery snow falling across my garden and beyond, into the wooded valley below.

Somehow, the music and the snowfall seemed in perfect synchronicity, like a well-choreographed ballet of my own imagination, as if the snow wouldn’t have fallen had I not played the music first.

Perhaps I won’t see any snowflakes here over the next few days, but playing Goodall’s sublime recording of Winterstürme this afternoon brought them to my mind as clearly as if I could touch them.