When he was a student, Christian Gerhaher was too busy getting through medical school to take a full program in music. That's just as well, he says, because otherwise he might have gotten too distracted by other people's ideas about how to sing.
Staying off the usual path had a very successful outcome, though not for Gerhaher's never-undertaken medical career. The German baritone, who performs Schubert's Winterreise with pianist Gerold Huber at Toronto's Koerner Hall on Thursday, is widely seen as one of the greatest living singers of lieder, or German art-song.
Even that comparative assessment may seem inadequate after you've heard Gerhaher perform. When he sang at Koerner Hall three years ago, he seemed to reinvent the art from the inside, as a kind of deeply dramatic recitation that naturally flowed out in song.
His conversation about singing and the musical life, on the phone from San Francisco, makes for a fascinating mixture of unaffected modesty and absolute assurance. He says he was "too dumb" for his first choice of study – philosophy – and defers to Huber, who he has known since school days, as the more broad-based musician.
"He's a real musician, I'm just a singer," says Gerhaher. "My music education was quite poor."
When the pair began working together on German lieder, which Gerhaher hadn't studied with anyone at that point, they couldn't find a teacher who would agree to coach them. "I was sad about that at the time, but now I'm very happy, because if we had had more help, we might have felt a need to fulfill someone else's ideas."
He says he feels sorry for some of the vocal students he sees when he himself gives lessons. "They have built up an inauthentic voice, based on a received idea of what they should sound like."
Gerhaher had studied violin and viola as a boy, and had no interest in vocal music, till a friend talked him into joining a choir. He realized right away that he could express himself much more completely and immediately in song than in instrumental music.
Still, he had other ideas about a career, and even when he had decided to take singing more seriously, after three years of medical school, he carried on to get his degree. "I decided to finish my medical studies before opening another bottle, if you know what I mean," he says.
He was still in medical school, studying music on the side, when he took master classes with the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was "a little skeptical about my abilities at the beginning." In the end, Gerhaher says, he realized that his best study was the kind of exploration he made on his own, and with Huber, with whom he has been working for 26 years.
He was especially drawn to lieder over opera, he says, because he found there was a freer range of thinking about what sound was appropriate for any particular work. In Germanic opera houses, the fach system strictly divides repertoire according to which narrow classification of range, colour and heft a singer's voice belongs.
"In lieder, it's not necessary to fulfil that kind of expectation," says Gerhaher. "You can find the right sound for a special song, or a special mood."
Even so, when he finished medical school in 1998, he joined the opera house at Wurzburg. He sang some roles that he has kept in his repertoire, including Wagner's Tannhauser and Monteverdi's Orfeo, but left after two years to pursue "my favourite thing" – lieder and chamber music.
Lieder has its own set of expectations, based on how a given song has been done before and on the piece's reputation. Gerhaher sees a lot of received ideas getting in the way of how major works in lieder are performed and received. The bleak overall mood of the 24 songs of Winterreise (Winter Journey), for example, has misled a lot of people, he says.
"Winterreise is sometimes used as a vehicle for a kind of existential horror trip to Death Valley," he says. "This disturbs me. If you take it only as an existential entertainment, the real content and meaning of this wonderful shimmering work disappears."
The protagonist in the Wilhelm Muller poems set by Schubert, he says, isn't someone longing for death, but a rather sarcastic spirit who consciously stands apart from ordinary humanity. He points to one song, In the Village, in which the protagonist surveys a village comfortably sleeping, and asks, with a mixture of envy and pride, "Why would I linger among the sleeping?"
Gerhaher says that the idea that the cycle's hero is in deathly despair has fostered a performance tradition that's alien to the songs' real character. "Some people make the melodic lines broader, in order to illustrate imaginative features like sighing or sobbing," he says.
At this point in his career, Gerhaher would seem to have nothing left to prove on his own account. But he still feels a burning need to demonstrate important truths about Schubert – another good reason to catch his Toronto recital.
Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber perform Schubert's Winterreise at Koerner Hall on Thursday at 8 p.m. (performance.rcmusic.ca).