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Autumn, 2007. Stuttgart. Mitsuko Shirai, a diminutive, gray-haired Japanese mezzo-soprano long resident in Germany, is explaining how she almost died earlier in the year, stricken by Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a paralyzing ailment which also attacked the novelist Joseph Heller (who recounted his travails in a 1986 memoir, No Laughing Matter). "I remember waking up in the hospital in London," Mitsuko says, "and the nurse ordering me: 'Mitsuko, breathe! Breathe!' I felt I was dying, with total calm and restfulness."
We are both in Stuttgart to serve on the jury of the International Competition for the Art of Lied, a triennial gathering of singers which is organized by the Internationale Hugo-Wolf-Akademie, a center for the study and performance of classical song. For around thirty years Mitsuko Shirai, known as the "Maria Callas of classical song," has performed poetry as transfigured in settings by the great lieder composers. Her recordings of Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, Liszt, Berg, Strauss, Mahler, and Wolf for the small German record label Capriccio make astonishingly intense, emotionally compelling listening. The story of her recent illness is equally gripping. Twenty years ago, on a CD of Brahms lieder in which she was accompanied by her then-husband Hartmut Höll-they continue to perform today, although they are now divorced-Mitsuko recorded a setting of Heine's short poem "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, / Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag" (Death is the cool night, / Life is the sultry day). The CD performance conveys a seraphic sense of acceptance and calm, embracing the coolness of night in preference to the scorching day. Brahms's music illuminates with wonderment the descriptive details of Heine's poem: " Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum, / Drin singt die junge Nachtigall." (A tree stretches over my bed, / on it, a young nightingale sings). As Mitsuko Shirai renders it, the song focuses intently on the natural world, after an initial voluntary abandonment of earthly things. The singled-out tree is like a solitary piece of scenery on stage in a Noh drama, symbolic of all the events that go on around it, and in its final couplet the song attains melodic heights of passion: "Sie singt von lauter Liebe / Ich hör es sogar im Traum" ([The nightingale] sings, acclaiming love...