The village of Frant is a small and peaceful community just south of Tunbridge Wells. It is the kind of place that could have featured in Schubert's Winterreise, a setting 24 short poems by Wilhelm Müller describing a desolate personal journey, beginning with rejected love - clearly by himself than the girl or her family - and ending with a vision of a pathetic, barefoot old man playing the hurdy-gurdy, derided by people and dogs, with no money in his plate and surviving only through his own persistence. Winterreise is end-game for Schubert, barely completed before his death at 31, and also for Sir Thomas Allen, whose own end game is increasingly reminiscent of late Beethoven.
Winterreise is not for laughs. If few words appear more than once, the German "Elend", which combines misery, suffering and wretchedness, certainly does, and an hour and a quarter of uninterrupted and unrelieved "Elend", delivered with Sir Thomas' wonderful combination of sound, expression and posture, demands great concentration even to listen to. The piece poses extreme technical demands, and there is only so much that the human frame will take, and the voice give.
This is the ultimate for both. Sir Thomas' publicity still tends to show him as a younger man than he is, and the photographs do not do him justice. One in The Times, some years ago, of him as the Count in Cosi Fan Tutte, did manage to catch the full power of expression he concentrates in his older face, and televsion got it right in the close-ups of his performance of Lover Come Back To Me with John Wilson in the Proms. Sustained over this length of time, and exploring the full range of Schubert's Elend, it is as much a part of the performance as the perfectly controlled, communicative and expressive singing and Joseph Middleton's perfect, selfless accompaniment, one of the finest examples of piano playing one will ever hear.
All, of course, in context. Winterreise is not for everyone, and, Mr Middleton's artistry notwithstanding, not for most of the young, for whom there is more to life than misery. And yet, as in Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, the soul will clap its hands and sing, the traveller take hold of his stout staff and continue on his way, room at the inn or no. Long may Sir Thomas' journey continue.