Listening to Schubert Lieder

When I was sixteen I knew most of these Goethe settings by heart and now I hear them again after many years, and I also hear myself sounding like Krishnamurti, whose work I read quite avidly for a short period in the early to mid-seventies, and liked it because there was no dogma and no commitment to some belief system, even though I would reject the idea that one can be 'committed' to a belief system anyway. But listening to Matthias Goerner singing the Schubert songs connects me to a much earlier self, aged sixteen and lying on a bed playing and replaying Fischer-Dieskau singing the same songs, with Gerald Moore. At Cotton David Finn, a boy soprano, had sung the Erlking, Bowie Owen giving over the piano to the virtuoso James Brennan, and it was a source of wonder, the thrilling accompaniment, the distinctive voices of narrator, father, child, Erlking. I was saturated with the words then, completely absorbed in them, whereas now I can barely remember them, and yet there is an identity across these fifty years, the same dreamy attention, the same states of mind. And I seem to search for these connections, seek to re-establish them, revisit my past, Cotton, Oscott, symbolised by the unavoidable Pugin, following me as it were to Stourbridge and there in my hauntings of Maynooth, to reconnect with the inner life of the adolescent or the young father ... as though I needed to discover a unity, a coherent thread of development but also continuity.