Most people think of Grace Bumbry as a Verdi mezzo overwhelmed by her vocal possibilities who ended up posing as a dramatic soprano. In any case, it would be difficult not to be overwhelmed by a voice like hers. It is unique in its blend of reediness and roundness – every register has its special feature and no note in the whole range is without color. But Bumbry was also a pupil of Lotte Lehmann and could be a terrific recitalist. Nobody would call her a Kunstdiva – and she often got away with generalised glamor. I had a teacher who said that there are two kinds of people – those with the soul of a Schubert singer and those with the soul of a Schumann singer. Bumbry was no miniaturist and fell naturally in the second group.
Among her recording of Brahms and Schumann, some are particularly effective, none more than this item from the Dichterliebe – Wenn ich in deine Auge seh’. The first time I listened to it, I could not stop repeating it. Then I checked Fischer-Dieskau, Wunderlich, you name it, but, no, after that, I can only listen to it sung by Grace Bumbry. First, she sees in this song something no other singer does. Heine’s verses are almost coy – When I look into your eyes, all my suffering and pains disappear/ but when I kiss your lips/ I am entirely healed./ When I lean against your breast/I am overcome with heavenly bliss/And when you say “I love you”/I must weep bitter tears. The key to Bumbry’s interpretation is the fact that the word “bliss” is a translation to “Lust”, which in German can also mean “lust”. The song indeed becomes, at each verse, more “physical” – we start with “eyes”, then we go to “lips”, then we have “breast”. At first, it seems that the closer the poet gets to his beloved, the better he feels: he is free of worries, then he is healed, then he is overcome with heavenly “bliss” but suddenly he weeps bitter tears. One wonders why hearing that he is loved makes him miserable – maybe because he now knows that, at his point, he can only find heavenly “bliss” with that one person. She is an exclusive supplier of that very good she may only advertise, but cannot sell… Hence the tears of frustration. A bitter feeling indeed.
Bumbry instinctively grasps the continuous change in atmosphere and depicts it in her voice. We hear the first two verses in almost conversational tone – a very seductive one, she sings only for you. The next two verses have a more vivid color – the words “Mund” (mouth) and “ganz” (entirely) spin in a rounder tone new to this song. In the verse “When I lean against your breast”, the tone has a firmer core a bit rich in lower resonance. “The voice has more body” is an image of what is going on in the poet’s mind. The next verse – the one about the heavenly “bliss” – was the single observation I had about Bumbry’s singing. First I disliked the portamento in “über mir” (Fischer-Dieskau does it just like that too), but now I would say that it feels “artificial” because this is the artificial verse in the poem. There is nothing “heavenly” going in the poet’s mind at this point. It is an overwhelming desire, but he cannot say it like that. When she sings “But when you say”, she does what all singers do – softer dynamics preparing for the “I love you”. It’s in the “Ich liebe dich”, however, when she got me. Fischer-Dieskau, for instance, almost whispers it, which is how almost everybody does. Bumbry doesn’t whisper – she sings it in a pop voice, a voice you would hear in a jazz diva, with that soft vibration and this marvellous “attack” on the d in “dich”. It’s sexy – you feel exactly what the poet felt when he heard his beloved’s chest vibrate with the sound of these words. She finally colors two syllables in the last verse – WEInen (weep) and bitTERlich (bitterly) with a chesty, darker sound. It’s intimate, it’s intense – you feel what he feels.
As often in Schumann, there are many syncopated rhythms and pianists often tend to make it a bit bouncier than they should (unless you really want to make it sound coy), but Leonard Hokanson is together with Bumbry in the slower tempo, the intimate sonorities, the syncopation suggesting hesitation rather than animation.
I HEAR VOICES 
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