The voices of singers tend to call forth abstract, flowery adjectives. But when you hear the baritone Matthias Goerne, it’s easy to point out the specific moments that distinguish his art. As Wotan from Wagner’s “Ring,” he sings about the castle of the gods as if it were a tender memory from Schubert’s “Winterreise.” In Hanns Eisler’s song “Der Sohn II,” he lends a flat, cynical timbre to a text about a child’s hunger that makes the listener’s stomach ache. Goerne was born in 1967 in Weimar—what was then East Germany. At our meeting in his dressing room in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, he wore jeans with a blue and white striped shirt, spoke with a pronounced sophistication, and switched to English from time to time if he gathered from my facial expression that I hadn’t understood an expression or term.
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