One of my musical regrets is that I never heard Fischer-Dieskau live in Winterreise. This DVD, made for German television in 1979 and pairing arguably the two greatest Schubertians of their generation, is the next best thing. The recorded sound is hardly flattering, and the voice is balanced too closely vis à vis the piano. But I quickly adjusted. Familiar charges of over-intellectualisation or ‘studiedness’ seem more than usually impertinent after this engulfing, disturbing, ultimately cathartic performance. Fischer-Dieskau’s voice – a shade lighter and more tenorish than in younger days – is in far finer condition than when he made his CD recording with Brendel a few years later. His breath control, enabling him to sing so many phrases in a single span where most singers take two, remains a miracle. He lives each phase of the wanderer’s plight, too, in his telling but unexaggerated facial and bodily gestures. From the intermittent shots of the pianist, Brendel likewise suffers alongside him.

From the briskly tramping ‘Gute Nacht’, flickering between tender regret, stoicism and fierce resentment, the performance seems to probe emotional extremes even more daringly than Fischer-Dieskau’s numerous CD versions: say, in the hallucinatory, visionary quality he brings to the major-key verses of ‘Der Lindenbaum’; the contrast between the frozen, eerie unreality at the opening of ‘Einsamkeit’ and the human anguish of the final page – here a miniature operatic scena of excruciating intensity; or his huge range of expression in the pivotal ‘Der Wegweiser’, from numb resignation, via violent protest, to horror (the singer’s face crumpled in appalled realisation) as he confronts the ‘road from which no man has ever returned’.

While I would have liked to hear more of him, Brendel’s pianism is a model of rhythmic and textural clarity, and matches Fischer-Dieskau all the way in dynamic and colouristic range. Tempos are never allowed to sag, and not for a moment is there a whiff of self-indulgence. It’s frustrating for Anglophone viewers that the generous rehearsal footage, moving chronologically through the cycle, has no subtitles. Even for German speakers, the microphones fail to pick up many of the brief exchanges between singer and pianist. What the rehearsal does confirm is that here is a true collaboration of equals, with the pair exchanging insights and suggestions over dynamic minutiae (say, in ‘Frühlingstraum’) and the precise timing and shaping of phrases. They constantly challenge each other to new levels of intensity. It’s revealing that when rehearsing songs he has known for nearly four decades, Fischer-Dieskau sometimes articulates the text in a near-Sprechgesang. The finished performance indeed conveys a sense of heightened speech, yet with the words perfectly integrated into a singing line – the supreme challenge in performing Lieder. ‘Not only a unique experience, but one to treasure for a lifetime’ was Alan Blyth’s verdict in his original Gramophone review. A decade on, I’d second that.