Matthias Goerne

Scofield: You have had such a wonderful lieder career. One of the things that we were saying was the rhythm, but having this kind of intuition and mastery of the rhythm really has been your trademark. A well-informed critic once said about you that, “what separates Goerne from most other singers is his mastery of rhythm, Goerne’s innate gift is to be able to mold the music with an almost uncanny feel for the inflections of pacing you would only find in a great conductor. With Goerne, rhythm is not the prison it is to many singers. It’s a force he uses to liberate the expressivity of the vocal line.” Do you think about rhythm a lot when you’re singing?

Goerne: I think the rhythm is everything, it’s what you have to keep in mind. You have to train your voice and you have to be sure about what you have to do if you want to have this kind of very specific color in this moment. And we’re talking about the decision of a nanosecond, that you think “oh no, that has to be darker”, or you have a word in mind like pale, or something that you have to prepare not ages before, just this moment when you sing it. So, this belongs more to the fact how many times you have to try out what you have to do with your vocal cords. For interpretation of an entire piece, what is the most important, even when the sound is sometimes not so much under control, it’s the inner rhythm and the rhythm inside the piece.

The decision you make when you start to sing a tone, from one word to the next one, that has to be absolutely definite and concrete. This is something I always try when I give masterclasses, or I have a student, and I really keep an eye on it, that they stay in tempo, that a dotted note has to be an absolutely perfect dotted note, that the entire kind of gesture is just by a kind of accurate kind of rhythm. It doesn’t mean that you have to swallow down a metronome and you stay always in this “tick, tick”. But you cannot take a sort of freedom because you think the sound sounds not nice enough on this high note, and you extend, or you make it shorter. I mean this is the sort of singing I do not like, and I also do not have so much respect for it. That’s why what this critic said, this is maybe one of the nicest kind of reviews I received. This is for sure something what I always try to do, that you do everything by the phrasing with the inner rhythm, and of course, you have a sort of flexibility inside, but absolutely with the right kind of taste.